Passionate ... Thrilling ... His plea for us all to adopt an ecological world view, one underpinned by the insights of symbiosis, is deeply rooted in his earlier career as a scientist, but Rowan’s many journalistic titbits...make it really fun.
Eye-opening ... Ambitious ... It sounds like a lovely idea, all these species banding together and lending each other a helping hand. But it’s not quite as warm and fuzzy as all that.
Not an attempt to make evolution cuddlier and more palatable; rather, it is a corrective deeply informed by what we have learned since Darwin about how nature works. Written with immense charm and passion, and packed with eye-popping facts, it is also a paean to the wonders of nature and the value and urgency of preserving them.
Ambitious but scattered ... While his storytelling is consistently entertaining, Hooper fails to knit his claims into the grand synthesis he promises. Still, readers will find a wealth of provocative ideas and memorable natural histories on offer here.
