Metazoan Variations

Metazoan Variations is a glorious mash-up of Darwin's science, Aesop's fables, Jenny Holzer's Truisms, and Sylvia Plath's poetry. The reader encounters ants making bread, a farting cuckoo, a moose eating peanut butter sandwiches and other wonders. Each segment offers a pithy title, a compressed story, some scientific knowledge, and a moral. It's satisfying. Bendzela's tour de force produces a new taxonomy for the twenty-first century. Ellen Lansky, author of Suburban Heathens Bendzela's fretful farmer leaves us under no illusion that we humans aren't fully functioning parts of a universe ruled by natural selection's Red Queen. Michele Cheung, Southworth Planetarium, University of Southern Maine