Once again, Mark Avery has not only pipped me to the post, he’s positively pummeled me to it. Not only has he already received a copy of James Lowen’s forthcoming book “Much Ado About Mothing; A Year Intoxicated by Britain’s Rare and Remarkable Moths,” he’s read it and published his review. Meanwhile, here I sit, far from dear old Blighty, hoping against hope that a copy might one day reach me.
If a friend were to ask you to recommend a modern book – just one – that would help him or her to understand your fascination with natural history, you’d likely be hard pressed to do it. I know I certainly would. After all, there are so many excellent works that have been published within this wide-ranging category over the past fifty years that picking just one would be quite a challenge indeed.
For those of who react allergically to grass, being able to identify one species from another is not only helpful, but in serious cases it can be potentially life saving as one thus knows when one is in the presence of a species that may cause a particularly severe respiratory reaction. The challenge is that the grasses are one of the trickiest of all the plant families to get sorted, and the sheer number of them here in Oregon and Washington – native and introduced – approaches four hundred when subspecies and varieties are included.
Written in a style that is very accessible to anyone with a minimum of a secondary school level understanding of biology and mathematics, and supported by helpful illustrations, “Viruses, Pandemics, and Immunity” provides clear and straightforward explanations of all the hot topic words and concepts involved in the current pandemic that have been filling the headlines this past year.