- Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company (September 14, 2021)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 320 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1324001933
- ISBN-13 : 978-1324001935
- Item Weight : 1.05 pounds
- Dimensions : 5.8 x 1.1 x 8.6 inches
One of Bookpage's Most Anticipated Nonfiction Books of 2021
Join "America’s funniest science writer" (Peter Carlson, Washington Post), Mary Roach, on an irresistible investigation into the unpredictable world where wildlife and humans meet.
What’s to be done about a jaywalking moose? A bear caught breaking and entering? A murderous tree? Three hundred years ago, animals that broke the law would be assigned legal representation and put on trial. These days, as New York Times best-selling author Mary Roach discovers, the answers are best found not in jurisprudence but in science: the curious science of human-wildlife conflict, a discipline at the crossroads of human behavior and wildlife biology.
Roach tags along with animal-attack forensics investigators, human-elephant conflict specialists, bear managers, and "danger tree" faller blasters. Intrepid as ever, she travels from leopard-terrorized hamlets in the Indian Himalaya to St. Peter’s Square in the early hours before the pope arrives for Easter Mass, when vandal gulls swoop in to destroy the elaborate floral display. She taste-tests rat bait, learns how to install a vulture effigy, and gets mugged by a macaque.
Combining little-known forensic science and conservation genetics with a motley cast of laser scarecrows, langur impersonators, and trespassing squirrels, Roach reveals as much about humanity as about nature’s lawbreakers. When it comes to "problem" wildlife, she finds, humans are more often the problem―and the solution. Fascinating, witty, and humane, Fuzz offers hope for compassionate coexistence in our ever-expanding human habitat.
Review
"Hilarious! With Fuzz, Mary Roach again takes us into an unfamiliar scientific realm, in this case the science of managing the conflicts between humans and the natural world―lethal leopards, rampaging elephants, jet-downing birds, even killer trees. It’s an ever-widening conflict zone, but one that Ms. Roach gleefully mines for a multitude of bizarre facts that’ll make you snort coffee through your nose."
― Erik Larson, bestselling author of The Splendid and the Vile
"Bestseller Roach sheds light on nature’s malefactors in this often funny, always provocative survey...Roach’s writing is wry, full of heart, and loaded with intriguing facts...This eminently entertaining outing is another winner from Roach."
― Publishers Weekly (starred review)
From the Back Cover
Praise for Mary Roach
"There is much to enjoy about Mary Roach―her infectious awe for quirky science and its nerdy adherents, her one-liners…She is beloved, and justifiably so."
― Jon Ronson, New York Times Book Review
"Our most consistently entertaining science journalist…Roach goes where other writers wouldn’t dare…And her search produces images―a kind of technopoetry―that are hard to forget."
― O, The Oprah Magazine
"Nobody does weird science quite like [Mary Roach]."
― Lexi Pandell, Wired
"[Mary Roach] is a bold, tenacious, and insatiable reporter…[She] has a knack for posing the embarrassing, nonlinear and too obvious questions that others are always afraid to ask."
― Pamela Paul, New York Times Book Review
"[Roach’s books are] meticulously researched, beautifully written, and disturbingly funny…Roach’s prose is a triumph―an engaging blend of anecdote, research, and reflection…She’s the most courageous―and empathetic―science writer we’ve got."
― Emily Rapp Black, Boston Globe
"Roach excels in capturing science’s ‘foreign country’ aspect―roaming as a stranger in a strange land among its weird norms and novelties, grand monomaniacal passions, practitioners’ idiosyncrasies and obscure lexicon…She writes exquisitely about the excruciating."
― Stephen Phillips, Los Angeles Times
About the Author
Mary Roach is the author of five best-selling works of nonfiction, including Grunt, Stiff, and, most recently, Fuzz. Her writing has appeared in National Geographic and the New York Times Magazine, among other publications. She lives in Oakland, California.
