The Cockroach Papers: A Compendium of History and Lore

"Schweid blends both roach fact and fiction into an engaging, perceptive profile of our strange, and occasionally literal, bedfellows." —Discover

Skittering figures of urban legend—and a ubiquitous reality—cockroaches are nearly as abhorred as they are ancient. Even as our efforts to exterminate them have developed into ever more complex forms of chemical warfare, roaches' basic design of six legs, two hypersensitive antennae, and one set of voracious mandibles has persisted unchanged for m...