The New York Review of Books: When a Scorpion Meets a Scorpion

0atwong • 14th Jun 2006 • Books, Conversation Pieces

Good books on the “smaller” word.

The New York Review of Books: When a Scorpion Meets a Scorpion
The invention of the microscope revealed wonders to the world, and permitted Jonathan Swift to quip:

So, naturalists observe, a flea
Hath smaller fleas that on him prey
And these have smaller still to bite ‘em
And so proceed ad infinitum.

By the late twentieth century fascination with the minuscule had begun to pall, and now it takes an exceptional book indeed to reawaken our interest. Thankfully, in David Attenborough’s Life in the Undergrowth, Piotr Naskrecki’s The Smaller Majority, and Jeffrey Lockwood’s Locust we find three works that do so.