Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

What is a Pest?

Pests: How Humans Create Animal Villains by Bethany Brookshire

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The book: Pests explores the way that humans decide which animals are worthy and which are, well, pests. Bethany Brookshire explores the way several animals have earned or been assigned the label of “pest,” including ones you may think of like rats or pigeons, but also those that may be surprising (to Americans, at least), like elephants. Some of the animals are pests because they enter our homes or yards against our will. Some are pests because we’ve encroached on their territory and they have nowhere else […]

No ifs ands or butts about it, I like to toot my own horn and say I like these science books!

Battle of the Butts: The Science Behind Animal Behinds by Jocelyn Rish

Does It Fart? A Kid's Guide to the Gas Animals Pass by Nick Caruso and Dani Rabaiotti

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This review will give you two science books for the humorous side of your reader interested in nontraditional facts about animals. However, I focus more on the first as it was my favoirte of the two. Battle of the Butts: The Science Behind Animal Behinds by Jocelyn Rish and illustrated by David Creighton-Pester is a humorous and educational picture book that gives you the poop on farts, butts and the animals that have them. From killer posteriors to beach building tushes, it is all here. […]

Civilization sucks

Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George

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CBR11bingo: Youths! Julie of the Wolves is the story of a 13-year-old Eskimo girl in Alaska named Miyax who is torn between the “old ways” of the traditional Eskimo people and the new ways that are taking hold of the larger communities in Alaska. When the novel opens, Miyax is lost on Alaska’s North Slope, having run away from home. Hungry and desperate, she attempts to communicate with a wolf pack, ingratiating herself to them until they accept her as one of their own. The […]

One of my favorite subjects

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My unerring interest in animal behavior sometimes has me wondering whether I should have become a wildlife biologist. If I were only braver and smarter, maybe I could have been a new Jane Goodall, spending my life in the woods and learning about a completely different species. But my interests are never persistent or steady enough to commit to anything like that. So I have to satisfy this interest with some occasional reading. I recently read Animal Wise by Virginia Morell, which I found both eye-opening […]

Animals are people, too, or people are animals, something like that

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Sometimes I think I should have been some kind of wildlife biologist/animal behaviorist. But not one that performs experiments or has to kill its research. I’d rather just watch and observe. In Animal Wise: The Thoughts and Emotions of Our Fellow Creatures (2013), Virginia Morell answers the question of whether animals are able to think and feel by describing studies done with a number of different animals. If you asked me when I was in kindergarten whether animals had thoughts or emotions, I would have said ‘of […]

A Haunting Tale about the Human/Animal Equation

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A laugh-out-loud/cry-out-loud tale designed to illuminate our lives and prick our conscience. It is the story of Rosemary, who begins her story “in the middle,” saving the big reveal for later. Rosemary is at college when the novel begins, suffering from a lack of friends, a lack of self-esteem and from a huge gaping hole inside her dating back to when she lost her twin sister Fern at age five, her beloved older brother Lowell not too long afterwards, and watched her father descend into […]



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