Two-for-one Book Review: Compare and Contrast

Okay, I promise to post something other than book reviews and links soon, but today you get double the science book review for half the reading. Or something like that.

I recently read two books back-to-back that were so similar in premise, size, and even layout that I couldn’t help but compare them. Both books were dedicated in their entirety to a single of type of small mammal, written by scientists who had studied them extensively, and both promised an intimate look at not just the animal in question but our longstanding relationship with it. The two books were “The Hedgehog’s Dilemma” by Hugh Warwick and “The Story of Rats” by S. Anthony Barnett. Unfortunately, the similarities end as soon as one begins to read. The books could not be more different in style, attitude, and, I dare say, quality.

“The Story of Rats” nearly lost me prior to opening with the subtitle: “Their impact on us, and our impact on them”. While I am used to, and even guilty of, the egregious misuse of the word “impact”, it was a bit shocking to find such poor grammar so brazenly splashed across the cover of what one hopes will be an intelligent book. Nevertheless, I soldiered on, hoping to learn more about this fascinating rodent whose destiny is so closely entwined with our own.

Unfortunately, I was disappointed. The book reads as if the author’s publisher said to him one day, “Hey, you study rats, right? How about whipping us up a little book about ‘em?” and the author went home and wrote down everything he knew about his subjects over the weekend and presented it as a manuscript on Monday. Which, if you read between the lines of the preface, may not be far from the truth. Although I am sure the author is indeed an expert on rats, I spotted enough casual mistakes to make it clear that he was drawing primarily from his personal knowledge with little fact checking (stating rats were eating corn in Europe prior to the date of European discovery of the New World and inaccurately reporting Ring Around the Rosie as a reference to the plague). Small mistakes in what I do know make me wary of accepting the author’s authority on what I don’t.

At no point does the author actually define what a rat is or isn’t, although he mentions several species of rats around the world and that some are not “true rats”; yet he never tells us what makes a true rat. Unsurprisingly, most of the book is devoted to the brown rat, Rattus norvegicus, and most of what we learn in the first couple chapters is nothing that anyone who watched the “Your Friend, The Rat” Pixar short on the DVD of Ratatouille didn’t already know. Once he has dispensed with the history, he goes on to he use of rats in research, their intelligence, habits, and function as disease vectors, sometimes talking down to his audience and at other times shooting over their heads.

The writing is mostly dry, and rather lazy, and the author shows a remarkable lack of affection for his subjects. He seems to take a very mechanistic view of animal life, which bothers me, believing that almost every behavior rats exhibit is pure instinct, and dismissing their intelligence out of hand. He even says at once point, “if rats think at all…”. I find that model of scientific inquiry extremely outdated given what we know of animal intelligence today. He also is dismissive of the degree to which the study of rats can be related to human behavior, which felt like it was based on pure bias (we aren’t like them) rather than actual science. Overall, I found the book, though short, extremely tedious and unhelpful, and in some places it downright pissed me off. It would have been better titled “Some Stories About Some Rats: Why They’ve Been a Pain In Our Ass for 8,000 years”.

“The Hedgehog’s Dilemma: A Tale of Obsession, Nostalgia, and the World’s Most Charming Mammal” is almost the complete opposite in every way. From the subtitle on the author makes no secret of his adoration for the prickly little things. The writing is personal, witty, honest, funny, and engaging. From his earliest adventures as a undergrad counting hedgehogs on a remote isle in the North Sea to the current rage in America for African hedgehogs as pets, the author recounts the story of our relationship with hedgehogs with sound science as well as sound journalism. Although he admits freely to loving hedgehogs, he also attempts to take an honest scientific look at their effects on the environment and their role in the ecosystem, including in places they have been introduced.

I found this book extremely interesting, as it was written from a British perspective. In the U.K. hedgehogs are as common as squirrels are in my east coast home, and hedgehogs as well as “carers” (enthusiasts who taken in orphaned and injured hedgehogs and nurse them back to health before releasing them) are simply everywhere. To me, who grew up in a place with no hedgehogs but reading a lot of British children’s fiction, hedgehogs are either exotic creatures or magical characters who talk in fairy tales. It boggles my mind that they are such a ubiquitous part of British culture.

It is difficult not to adopt some of the author’s hoggy enthusiasm, and the book does not disappoint the sudden thirst to know more, which it itself inspires. We learn about the evolution, natural history, anthropology, and cultural effects of the hedgehog, as well as its unique personality and the even more unique personalities of those who care for them. The book is at once intensely personal and scientifically rigorous. My only complaint with the writing is a niggle – he tends to drop people’s names into the text without properly introducing who they are and where they have come from. Other than that, this book was a gem – and it gets bonus points for the section at the end about how to make your garden more hedgehog-friendly.

~ by lycaon on July 18, 2011.