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which is not to say that grice is an alarmist by any means. he takes great pains to illustrate the rarity of death by poisonous or aggressive animal (in certain parts of the world, like where i live, anyway), and in fact is insistent upon implicating willful or ignorant humans in situations that ended badly due to said willfulness or ignorance. the history of nature writing and reporting is fraught with bias, with animals anthropomorphized to meet some human standard of evil- or where the animal is exculpated wrongfully, the aggression dismissed as an aberration despite its abundant presence in the history of that species' interactions with man- both approaches dismissing the essential nature of, well, wild nature, and also discounting the inevitable miscommunication and confusion involved when humans tangle with wild things. our understanding is limited to what we know- what that charging bear knows and perceives as a threat may be totally different. It rarely crosses my mind, but in theory (reality is a different story) I live with a predator with very efficient weapons and methods for killing. A devout Muslim, al-Jahiz regarded the physical world as the visible sign of God's will. His purpose in writing the Book of Animals was not merely to entertain, but to lead his readers to an appreciation of the wonders of God's creation, which he believed to be as manifest in the most insignificant as in the grandest: grice is quoting from another source, and i don't feel like being all proper in my citations but anyway so there is this guy who was bitten by a hyena, whose
In Baghdad, al-Jahiz not only fused the Islamic sciences to Greek rationalism, but created Arabic prose literature. He showed that Arabic was flexible enough to handle any subject with ease, and although he was not personally associated with the House of Wisdom, his linguistic achievement paralleled - indeed surpassed - the efforts of the scholars engaged in rendering Greek scientific texts into Arabic. Sadly, few works of al-Jahiz have survived the vicissitudes of time, but those that have make us regret all the more the ones that have been lost. Together they present a faithful and lively portrait of Baghdad and Basra during the Golden Age of Islam. He writes of singing girls, vagabonds, scholars, theologians, caliphs and viziers, and a very detailed picture of everyday life in ninth-century Iraq could be extracted from his works. More importantly, he communicates to us the excitement of an intelligent non-specialist confronted with radical scientific, philosophical and theological speculations. Baghdad and Basra were awhirl with ideas, and al-Jahiz is very funny about the pretensions of people who studded their conversation with technical terms like "atom" without in the least understanding what an atom was.
Amazing animal records
Born about the year 776, some 14 years after the foundation of Baghdad by the Abbasid Caliph al-Mansur, al-Jahiz grew up in Basra, founded early in Islamic times as a garrison city, but now, along with its rival city, Kufa, a major intellectual center. face ended below his cheekbones: his nose, palate, upper teeth, tongue, and almost his entire lower jaw were gone. only his eyes and the upper part of his head remained intact and yet he was alive and moderately healthy and had taught himself to swallow food. he had received one bite, just one snap
Anyway, although I enjoyed this book, I have to go with three stars because while the research is apparent the accuracy suffers in the efforts to create a conversational (vs. "academic") read. We share our planet with animals. They come in many shapes, sizes and colors. Inspired by the bestselling picture book, Here We Are, comes this irresistible alphabet book to welcome babies and toddlers to our planet. Despite his propensity to meander in prose, al-Jahiz was particularly interested in style and correct expression. "The best style," he says in an essay on schoolteachers, "is the clearest, the style that needs no explication and no notes, that conforms to the subject expressed, neither exceeding it nor falling short."These are big societal problems and they demand big societal solutions,” says Yong. Nevertheless, he shows that much noise and light pollution can be ameliorated by simple, practical tweaks. Swapping LED lights from blue/white hues to red means they are less harmful to bats and insects. Reducing ship speeds by just 12% in the Mediterranean has been shown to halve engine noise in the sea. From the skies to the animal kingdom to the people of the world and lots of other beautifully rendered examples of life on Earth, Here We Are carries a simple message: Be kind. -- NPR
that being said, while the book is deeply interesting throughout, and thoroughly researched so as to be based in fact, there are certain chapters that read more like outlandish science fiction/horror, and i wish i could remove from my brain with a tweezer tidbits from the chapters on insects and rodents and such. nature in its endless variation is, in a word, terrifying. who knew there were so many painful and hideous ways to die?? or worse, to survive in a condition of endless ill-health and deformity? i shudder to think of meeting a brown recluse, or a single malarial mosquito.... eugh. it's enough to make a person want to live in a bubble. holy shit, right? one bite and he lost half his face to some hyena. there is also a story in here about a woman who passed out during childbirth and came to to find a hyena eating her baby. seriously - hyenas are complete jive.During his long lifetime - he lived until he was 92 - al-Jahiz composed some 200 works, of varying length, on an extraordinary range of topics. Of these, only 30 or so survive today - enough nevertheless to show the omnivorous curiosity of the author. Al-Jahiz wrote Levity and Seriousness, The Art of Keeping One's Mouth Shut, Misers, Early Arab Food, In Praise of Merchants, Against Civil Servants, The Squaring of the Circle, The Merits of the Turks, and, perhaps the most important, the Book of Animals. Primates’ ability to see red colours probably helped them find edible berries and tender rainforest leaves but later many great apes evolved patches of bare skin that flush red to send signals – usually sexual – to each other. Meanwhile, a giant squid’s eyes have evolved to be so large so they can detect one of their greatest foes, sperm whales, as they collide with jellyfish, which emit flashes of bioluminescence in the dark ocean. there were so many more quotes i wanted to share. maybe i will float this later with "additional information."
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