When this popped up in the book section of the NYT this week, it was instant love for me. The cover design is elegant, successfully combining scientific image with softer script and flourish. I also have an odd fascination with horseshoe crabs having spent much time in close examination of them growing up when they washed up on the beaches near my childhood home. A scientific consideration of them made me both nostalgic and curious. But then this from the review left me with little choice but to seek this one out:
"The good news about “Horseshoe Crabs and Velvet Worms” is that Mr. Fortey is as vivid and charming about live things as he’s long been about dead ones, perhaps even more so. Reading this book is like stepping into the field with a man who’s equal parts naturalist and poet, let’s say equal parts E. O. Wilson and Paul Muldoon. The Wilson in him wields the notebook; the Muldoon flutters. It’s a bewitching combination."
Flutters. Bewitching. Soon to be mine.
