Oh, the places we’ve explored with Mary Roach as the guide! The morgue, the afterlife, the bedroom, the battlefield, our own alimentary canals, and space. In Fuzz, we follow her gladly down the fraught path of human-wildlife conflicts. What to do when animals break laws meant for humans? Thorny matters indeed. Mary Roach, the science teacher we all wish we’d had in school, is never afraid to ask any question. “I’m here. I might as well ask,” she states. That she unabashedly does so means we readers are by far richer for the delicious wildness and range of her curiosity.
An Instant New York Times Bestseller • #1 Los Angeles Times Bestseller • #1 Indie Hardcover Nonfiction Bestseller • Longlisted for the 2022 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction • A New York Times Editors' Choice • A Washington Post Notable Book of 2021 • A Goodreads Choice Award Finalist • An NPR 2021 Best Book of the Year • A New York Public Library 2021 Best Book of the Year • A BookPage Best Book of 2021, Nonfiction • A Bookshop.org Best Nonfiction Book of 2021 • A Chicago Public Library Best Book of 2021 • A Library Journal Best Science & Technology Book of 2021 • A Publisher's Weekly Best Book of 2021 • Science Best Book of 2021 • A Smithsonian 10 Best Science Book of 2021 • A St. Louis Public Radio Best Book of 2021
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.
Mary Roach is the author of five best-selling works of nonfiction, including Grunt, Stiff, and, most recently, Fuzz. Her writing has appeared in National Geographic and the New York Times Magazine, among other publications. She lives in Oakland, California.
