The Book of Barely Imagined Beings: A 21st Century Bestiary by Caspar Henderson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was not the book I expected when I ordered it, but I completely loved it.

I thought I was getting a coffee table book about biology with lots of pictures, instead turns out it's mostly words. (The hardcover is beautifully laid out, though.) The book is twenty-six essays titled around different, often weird, animals. Only some are primarily about their nominal subject. Some are riffs on biological features specific to the animals, others move into more general ruminations about folklore or philosophy or environmental hazards.

To take a couple examples, the opening essay is on the axolotl and spends around half the essay on medieval tales about salamanders dancing in fire and other interpretations of those amphibians--before describing a bit about evolution of the first land animals and how the tiny guys were doing cute little push ups back in the day, before getting around to saying something about the creature itself. Or, for humans, the distinctive feature he picks out is our feet--we're a two legged creature that walks instead of hopping and a lot follows from our bodies need to accommodate that. Chapters on octopuses, Gonodactylus smithii, dolphins and pterosaurs, on the other hand, are more straightforward zoology. (A few bits don't work that well, hence the book narrowly avoiding a 5-star rating.)

Since I have a visceral dislike for the sort of essay that starts with quantum entanglement and ends with the 'interconnectedness of the universe' or something, it took me a while to figure why the barely-science essays didn't bother me. (Beyond the fact that they often quite interesting on their own.) I think it's because Henderson clearly was fascinated by and respected the science; he knew the difference between when he was saying "This is what we've learned from science" and "This bit of science puts me in mind of this story I heard" and doesn't confuse the two.

In closing, here's a picture of a Yeti crab: .

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