Life in Cold Blood
by David Attenborough
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Book Summary Information
Author: David AttenboroughEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2008-03-10
ISBN: 0691137188
Number of pages: 288
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Book Reviews of Life in Cold Blood
Book Review: Marvels of life among the cold blooded.
Summary: 4 Stars
Life in Cold Blood
My admiration for this book stems from a mix of my ignorance of taxonomy and my perspective as a neurologist. This explains my inability to comment on any of the misspellings and errors detected by some of the other reviewers. With every book I read on comparative anatomy or evolutionary physiology, my erstwhile enthusiasm, rigid and fixed, for the human nervous system relents. It admits graciously a greater pervasive wonder for life across the spectra of all animal forms. This is the promontory from which I approach this work.
This book of 281 pages and 6 chapters is aglow with vivid pictures of animal grandeur. Frogs, salamanders, lizards, iguanas, crocodiles, turtles or snakes greet you page after page. We learn about the anatomy, behavior and evolution of amphibians, reptiles and other cold-blooded animals. There are exquisite descriptions, whether it is of snakes calibrating their predatory strikes or of frogs producing internal anti-freeze to survive the arctic chill. Elaborate mating rituals of frogs and eating patterns of pythons would fascinate the reader.
It is likely that other books in this area have covered as much ground or even more. That possibility need not reduce the merit of this volume. The comparative biology that underpins this volume is a riveting reading experience in itself. There are numerous utterly captivating mechanisms that the cold blooded animals use to protect and evolve. They may suppress one lung, right or left, from fully developing, secrete, shoot or spit various venoms, protrude and circumduct their fangs, hibernate in extreme cold and even carry their own radiators and solar panels.
Preservation and reproduction call for such grand and complex acts.
Across all living organisms, including humans, the overriding emphasis is on self-preservation and procreation. We might be relying on precision bombing and in-vitro fertilization, and they may use their toxins and gastric pregnancy with regurgitation of their young. Even herding and social structuring apparently existed from prehistoric to contemporary times. Regardless of our own sophistication, we still share many basics with the cold-blooded animals. If nothing else, this is a beautiful lesson that I learn and relearn from works such as this. My only quarrel with this delicious book is the absence of scholarly citations or references to primary research that would have enabled further reading.
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