The Standard Pesticide User's Guide Book

I have never read a book quite like this. As I understand it, this brief text is just a selection of entries from Fabre's "Souvenirs entomologiques." If this small preview is anything like the rest, I should dearly love to peruse them all! Fortunately, they have been gathered together in a number of small English collections like this by his wonderful translators Alexander Teixeira de Mattos and Bernard Miall.

I cannot imagine anyone, with the slightest entomological interest or not, disliking this book. Even the age of the document, usually so crucial in matters of science, is of little concern here. Fabre's commendable propensity towards the observable fact makes everything stated therein remarkably still accurate. Even when he conjectures, which is rarely, he takes care to qualify it as such; usually with a remark on his uncertainty in the matter. He has a method of making each of his subjects, be it cicada or mantis, supremely approachable. Somehow he does this without watering down their alien otherness. Adding to this, he often digresses into alleys of a more sociological bent, often comparing the lives of the insects to our own. His comments on war, women's rights, the practices of contemporary science; these all give so much flavor that it's impossible not to like the man.

Suffice it to say, Jean-Henri Fabre is my new favorite person in all of time and space.