One of Audible's Best of 2021
One of AudioFile Magazine's Best Audiobooks of 2021
An Instant New York Times Bestseller
#1 Los Angeles Times Bestseller
#1 Indie Hardcover Nonfiction Bestseller
A Washington Post and Publishers Weekly Best Nonfiction Book of
2021
Longlisted for the 2022 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in
Nonfiction
Join "America's funniest science writer" (Peter Carlson, Washington
Post), Mary Roach, on an irresistible investigation into the
unpredictable world where wildlife and humans meet.
What's to be done about a jaywalking moose? A bear caught breaking and
entering? A murderous tree? Three hundred years ago, animals that broke
the law would be assigned legal representation and put on trial. These
days, as New York Times best-selling author Mary Roach discovers, the
answers are best found not in jurisprudence but in science: the curious
science of human-wildlife conflict, a discipline at the crossroads of
human behavior and wildlife biology.
Roach tags along with animal-attack forensics investigators,
human-elephant conflict specialists, bear managers, and "danger tree"
faller blasters. Intrepid as ever, she travels from leopard-terrorized
hamlets in the Indian Himalaya to St. Peter's Square in the early hours
before the pope arrives for Easter Mass, when vandal gulls swoop in to
destroy the elaborate floral display. She taste-tests rat bait, learns
how to install a vulture effigy, and gets mugged by a macaque.
Combining little-known forensic science and conservation genetics with a
motley cast of laser scarecrows, langur impersonators, and trespassing
squirrels, Roach reveals as much about humanity as about nature's
lawbreakers. When it comes to "problem" wildlife, she finds, humans are
more often the problem―and the solution. Fascinating, witty, and humane,
Fuzz offers hope for compassionate coexistence in our ever-expanding
human habitat.
