Ten Million Aliens

Starred review from December 8, 2014
Barnes (How to Be a Birdwatcher), an English sports writer, nature writer, and novelist, embarks on a vast survey of the animal kingdom. The 460 pages of descriptions of various phyla are a joy to read: funny, thoughtful, informative, and wise. Barnes divides the world’s creatures into vertebrates and invertebrates, alternating his 130 short chapters between the two. A superb writer, he packs an amazing amount of material into each brief chapter, and makes stories about tiny velvet worms, giant squid, peripatetic albatrosses, and sessile barnacles equally captivating. His scientific facts are well chosen and creatively mixed with firsthand descriptions of his travels across Africa, Great Britain, and beyond. Barnes is as comfortable discussing crickets as cricket and weaves literature with natural history. Without moralizing, Barnes also situates Homo sapiens as just one species within the animal kingdom, forcing readers to think about the damage we are doing to so many of our fellow species. The book is all but impossible to put down, and for good measure, Barnes explains the process of evolution as well as any popular science writer.

January 1, 2015

Sports, nature, and travel writer Barnes (formerly Times of London and Bird Watching with Your Eyes Closed) aims to teach that humans are related to all animals and to "the planet that supports us." Unfortunately, one can't teach without respecting readers' diverse attitudes or providing useful information, and Barnes does little of either. He claims that those who appreciate flies' acrobatics have at best "a rare passion," or at worst are children or on drugs, and titles a chapter about an intricate marine worm with the bleeped-out f-word. The author also fails to mention that parasitic wasps and mantids prey on garden pests, white nose syndrome is decimating U.S. bats, and medical maggots clean infected wounds. He suggests that readers learn butterfly identification but offers no other advice for observing or aiding wildlife. VERDICT Barnes fans will enjoy this work. For everyone else, better choices for nurturing a love of all creatures are the field guides for every part of the country, Nancy Knowlton's Citizens of the Sea, Ellen Prager's Sex, Drugs, and Sea Slime, and Kelly Lambert's The Lab Rat Chronicles.--Eileen H. Kramer, Georgia Perimeter Coll. Lib., Clarkston

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