Spiders, Snakes, and Other Outcasts: A Review

"To call a man a worm is to indicate about the lowest possible opinion of him. This betrays ignorance. Worms are among the most successful forms of life. They are so remarkably successful, in fact, that it is necessary to go in for careful definitions to decide whether many wormlike creatures deserve the accolade of being called worms." -Robert Froman

-Spiders, Snakes, and Other Outcasts 1965 -Robert Froman

This quote amuses me... my husband says in the oil field (where he works) they call new guys "worms"

hehe!

I. Love. This. Book. 

I am constantly discovering these wonderful living books inside my small town library. I mentioned this book inside a facebook group I belong to but I wanted to go into it with a a little more detail to show you why this book is so cool and why it's so alive.

The author seems very upset by the fact that most people find some extraordinary animals "hateful". He is clearly one of the "few thousand human beings" that find these animals fascinating. He writes this book with chapter titles such as The Not So Humble Worms and They That Go Upon The Belly. This book has a copyright date of  1965!! I wonder how long it has been in my library...

This first chapter of this book called Why the Hate has some awesome information in it for the reader. It talks about Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus and Species. He also explains why being terrified by certain creatures stops us from being able to learn about them and understand them. And he has a few theories on why people might be so revolted. :)

This book is filled with tons of information on worms, spiders, octopi, bats, snakes, vultures, roaches, and toads. Some of it could be scientifically outdated but that just creates more learning opportunities as far as I am concerned.

My ONLY qualm... which I find I have for a lot of random living books I end up finding in my old library is that this author loves evolution and sees through that lens exclusively. So all information in this book is filtered through his views. There is even a section in the back where he lays out a timeline of when things first appeared or evolved... Now I do not believe in evolution one bit so I had to filter this entire book through my own lenses and such... but not hard to do depending on the age and maturity of the reader.

My favorite part about this book... the vocabulary. This book is RICH with awesome descriptive imagery. And my brain absolutely loves reading books with words I don't usually use or see daily. It keeps me interested and turns gears for me while I read so that my short attention span can stay tuned.

Here is the Amazon link to this book should you wish to check it out further. :)


Happy Reading!