Metazoan Variations

Metazoan Variations is a glorious mash-up of Darwin's science Aesop's fables Jenny Holzer's Truisms and Sylvia Plath's poetry. The reader encounters ants making bread a farting cuckoo a moose eating peanut butter sandwiches and other wonders. Each segment offers a pithy title a compressed story some scientific knowledge and a moral. It's satisfying. Bendzela's tour de force produces a new taxonomy for the twenty-first century. Ellen Lansky author of Suburban Heathens Bendzela's fretful farmer leaves us under no illusion that we humans aren't fully functioning parts of a universe ruled by natural selection's Red Queen. Michele Cheung Southworth Planetarium University of Southern Maine