Book Reviews
Wicked Bugs: The Louse That Conquered Napoleon's Army & Other Diabolical Insects by Amy Stewart. Illustrated by Briony Morrow-Cribbs. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, NC, 2011.Small Hardcover, 288 pp., ISBN 13 978-1565129601, $18.95.
Author Amy N. Stewart is an American author specializing in books on horticulture and the natural world. She has also been featured on "CBS Sunday Morning." Her poison plant garden is included in Popular Mechanics' list of the 18 strangest gardens in the world. She received a B.A. degree in anthropology and a master's in community and regional planning from the University of Texas at Austin. She lives in Eureka, California, where she is a regular columnist for the North Coast Journal. Stewart is a founder of the horticultural blog, Garden Rant.
This is not your traditional look at bugs and what they do and how to get rid of them. In a breezy, light tone and pace, this book describes all sorts of frightening details about 50 to 100 insects and what they can or cannot do. This is not an in depth book about insects or insects and plants, but more a capsule biography of each bug from flies that transmit deadly diseases, "bookworms" that devour libraries and millipedes that stop traffic. The bugs are grouped into, painful, dangerous, horrible, deadly, and destructive. There is an extensive bibliography and a resource section as well. Intricate and strangely beautiful etchings bring life to the bugs.
Under Destructive, you might find out about the night crawler. Yes, a worm, but one that is not native and seems to be eating a lot of forest understory plants, as discovered in the 1990's by the University of Michigan. Why and how this happened is part of this chapter. Under dangerous is the deer tick, and we all have heard about Lyme Disease. This chapter explains how it was discovered and why it was called Lyme Disease. The painful group has a chapter on tarantulas. This is a tale of an attempted murder using the tarantula's venom sac, hid in a blackberry pie, which didn't work. The bite of a tarantula may be very painful and has been found to react on nerve cells "with the same mechanism employed by habanera peppers," but the bite is not fatal. Want to know why the Italian tarantella is name after this insect? You'll need to read the book. Although I might not read it at night as some of this can be more of a horror story or at the very least have you looking under the covers.
Previous Book Reviews available for downloading: