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Swimming With Piranhas At Feeding Time: My Life Doing Dumb Stuff With Animals (2009)

by Richard Conniff(Favorite Author)

3.55 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

0393068935 (ISBN13: 9780393068931)

languge

English

genre

Memoir & Autobiography

publisher

W. W. Norton & Company

review 1: Well-written, insanely informative and lots of fun. Conniff is wry, self-deprecating and endearingly goofy. For me, the standout chapter was The Value of a Good Name. If you have the slightest interest in nomenclature and science, you owe yourself this slice of real-life hilarity. I learned things about Piranhas (including the fact I've been pronouncing it wrong all these years), how to find spiderwebs (fill a sock with cornstarch- shake gently over your yard- boggle at the fecundity), what happens when your botfly hatches out of your skull at a baseball game, and what Gerald Durrell drank for breakfast. Wonderful anecdotes abound.Conniff isn't in this for the depth, but he sure makes the surfaces sparkle.Highly recommended.
review 2: Some of the essays I’ve ... moreenjoyed quite a lot but I tend to get fidgety when too much technical information is included, with the exception of the chapter on termites! I would enjoy reading essays here and there much more than reading the collection straight through. Some of the writing is in the same humorous vein as Mary Roach, the author of Stiff, Spook and Bonk. I had hoped that more of the essays would stress the high danger aspect that seems to be promised by the subtitle but with a few exceptions, it didn’t feel like truth in advertising to me. less

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