Product Description

David Attenborough reveals a secret universe - it is teeming with life and is all around us, yet we never see it. It is the world of the very small, and it is a world of sex, drugs and violence. Here David shows us not just bugs, beetles and creepy-crawlies, but scorpions and centipedes, mites and mantids, spiders and dragonflies. And not just life in the undergrowth, but the dramatic battles between predator and prey that are happening in the corner of your living room and in your larder. See magnificent spectacles: swarming antler moths; millions of desert locusts; a mountain of locusts. For every pound of humans on Earth, there are 300 pounds of insects.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #21111 in Books
• Published on: 2005-10-10
• Released on: 2005-10-10
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 320 pages

Customer Reviews

Excellent, beautifully illustrated
The book to accompany Attenborough's exploration of the tiny world of the insects. An excellent, well packaged, highly informative and profusely illustrated little tome, this is great value and an exciting and stimulating introduction to the subject. The material presented is accessible - you will not be baffled by academic or scientific jargon - and, far from being simply a reference book, this is a very readable volume. It will stimulate your interest in the subject.

However, this is not the television series - the photographs are excellent, the writing clear, but the book cannot capture the excitement and wonder which the moving image achieves. BBC television has an extraordinary record in presenting wildlife programmes, and the filming of this series is of the highest quality. The book, therefore, is a little disappointing purely and simply because it cannot offer the momentum and dynamic of the moving image and 'live' sound.

I comment on the difference between book and programme not as a criticism, but as a warning - I have often heard people complain that a book didn't live up to the series. They're different animals. If you don't get the same sense of immediacy and presence from the book, what you do get is a lasting sense of wonder. Books like this inspire people to look further into the subject. You will find yourself reading this and stopping to watch insects differently. Beware - there are pictures of spiders; while these are misunderstood little creatures, they do scare the …. out of many people, so be wary who you sit next to when reading it. Of course, if you have a malicious sense of humour, I recommend leaving the book open at page … .

Life as you have never seen it before

I thought this book was very good, since it gave a very general aspect of many insects, in their own habitat. The pictures are of very high quality and there is some material in the book which is not available in the DVD. Of course there are some things which are only shown in the DVD, such as the area where it shows the development of a bumblebee nest.
I do think that it is probably his best book so far out of all his nature books. I would recommend this book to everyone who is starting to study nature.

Could and should have been so much more
I cant help thinking cynically after reading the book that its a bit of a con, making you buy the book as the series is so good but the book is not closely related enough to the series, the chapters are the same and it features many of the same anecdotes of invertebrate behaviour but the pictures were not taken as part of the filming of the show, if only they were! They are stock photos and while some are of a very high standard (one page showing 4 photos of a dragonfly emerging from his chrysalis) some are not so impressive which is not something you really expect from a book accompanying a david attenborough series.

The dvd is worth owning but the book is not.