PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewThe sheer scale and variety of insects are impossible for most of us to contemplate, but Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson provides at least a glimpse of their wonder in her charming Buzz, Sting, Bite. In essence, the book is an extended meditation on a question that Sverdrup-Thygeson, an entomologist at Norway’s University of Life Sciences, gets asked all the time: What good are bugs anyway? ... The famous biologist E. O. Wilson once said: \'If human beings were to disappear tomorrow, the world would go on with little change. … But if invertebrates were to disappear, I doubt that the human species could live more than a few months.\' Sverdrup-Thygeson makes much the same case. But while Wilson’s quote is laced with doom, Sverdrup-Thygeson strives to make you like insects, too, highlighting them in all their buzzing, stinging, biting glory.
