Skip to main content

The Atlas of Poetic Zoology - Emmanuelle Pouydebat (trans. Erik Butler) ***

There something of a literary version of a cabinet of curiosities about The Atlas of Poetic Zoology - it features 36 species, selected because they were outstanding to the author for a whole range of reasons, though many seem to have been chosen because they're strange-looking. Each animal gets two or three pages of text and a full page illustration, which unfortunately is painted rather than photographed, so it can be difficult to be sure how accurate the representation is - though it does make some of the illustrations rather beautiful as items in their own right.

I found it entertaining to flick through, but isn't a book I can recommend to sit down and read end to end. In large part this is down to the text. Because it's a translation, I don't know if the wording, which feels a bit like a year 9 school essay, reflects the original or the way it has been rendered into English, but the result feels a distinctly immature piece of writing.

Here's the opening of the first item, on the African Bush Elephant, to demonstrate the style: 'No animal inspires as much affection, fear and admiration in me as the biggest land mammal alive. It's hard to find a species as complex and fascinating, or as paradoxical, as the African elephant. Complex and fascinating? Indeed! The elephant displays a broad array of incredible behaviors and physical aptitudes, some of which we cannot explain at all. Paradoxical? But of course.' And there are more rhetorical questions? And exclamation marks! But of course.

I don't deny the fascination of some of these creatures, whether in the etherial beauty of the blue dragon sea slug, the remarkable imitation of a flower by the orchid mantis or the downright weirdness of the the red-lipped batfish. (The illustration is straight out of the Beatles' cartoon version of Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, though the painting does look even weirder than the real thing.) However, this approach didn't work for me as a way to get across the wonders of these exotic organisms.

Oh, and it's not an atlas.
Hardback:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ignorance: How it drives science – Stuart Firestein *****

This is a delightful little book that really gets you thinking. I stress the ‘little’ part not as a negative, but as a good thing. There is nothing worse than fat, bloated popular science books where the author feels they have to get 120,000 words to be taken seriously. This is the sort of book that can be read in a couple of hours – but you will get so much more out of it than one of those tedious doorstops. The premise underlying the book is in once sense extremely simple, yet is fundamental to an understanding of what science is and what scientists do. And it is an understanding that is totally at odds with the typical way science is portrayed both in university lectures and popular science books. As Stuart Firestein points out, what is important is not the facts, but rather the area of ignorance. The interesting part and the fundamental heart of science is not about what we know, but about what we don’t know and where we want to look next. Take this lovely quote: ‘Working ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Who Invented the Computer? – Ian Watson

Ian Watson is the author of  The Universal Machine  and featured in a recent  Four Way Interview . Saturday June 23 2012 was the centenary of the birth of Alan Turing, the troubled genius who invented the modern computer. Why though do so few people recognize his name and his great achievements? In 1936 English mathematician Alan Turing, published a paper,  On Computable Numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem . This became the foundation of computing. In it Turing presented a theoretical machine that could solve any problem that could be described by instructions encoded on a paper tape. A Turing Machine could calculate square roots, whilst another might solve Sudoku puzzles. Turing demonstrated you could construct a single  Universal Machine  that could simulate any Turing Machine. One machine solving any problem for which a program could be written – sound familiar? He’d invented the computer. Then,  computers  were peop...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Star Book – Peter Grego ****

This attractive landscape format book combines an excellent introduction to the stars and basic astronomy with a set of star maps, plus in depth looks at some of the stars featured, with a  bonus section on the solar system. Amazon says it’s a hardback, but in fact it’s a paperback with a rather ingenious cover – you can’t tell from the photo, but the words ‘The Star Book’ are punched through as a series of holes that show the white paper of the next page beneath. Like many astronomy/space books, the cover lacks shelf appeal because it is mostly black, but at least there is some original thought here. Unlike many books in this format which tend to concentrate on the pictures, there is a good deal of excellent text by Peter Grego, so there was no feeling that you were only getting the star maps and star ‘biographies’, something these days much more suited to an iPad or smartphone app. Instead, the opening 30 or so pages give a very good introduction that would be valuable to ...
Post a Comment
Read more