Description
Book SynopsisA compelling and innovative exploration of how animals shaped the birth of natural history and its ecological afterlives
Trade Review“Full of insight and wit,
Curious Species is a genre-expanding account of knowledge and politics. Deeply researched and a joy to read, this book illuminates the ways animals from rattlesnakes to raccoons co-made our understandings of them.”—Bathsheba Demuth, author of
Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait“A provocative, sparklingly written hybrid work combining original historical scholarship with lively first-person narrative and natural historical observation.”—Anya Zilberstein, author of
A Temperate Empire: Making Climate Change in Early America“Early modern cabinets of curiosity generated sensations of wonder. So does
Curious Species, with its awe-inspiring tales from the past and breathless accounts of Whitney Barlow Robles’s fearless pursuit of rare coral, raccoons, and rattlesnakes.”—Peter C. Mancall, author of
Nature and Culture in the Early Modern Atlantic“
Curious Species is exceptional: Whitney Robles has crafted a highly original, convincing, nuanced, and thought provoking study of how curiosity and animal nature overlap to shape, inspire, and circumscribe knowledge.”—Cameron B. Strang, author of
Frontiers of Science: Imperialism and Natural Knowledge in the Gulf South Borderlands, 1500–1850“A captivating account of the many ways in which humans and other animals made each other ‘curious,’ in the eighteenth century and today. Whitney Barlow Robles expertly leads us in pursuit of Enlightenment naturalists as they observe, describe, depict, collect, and preserve corals, rattlesnakes, fish, and raccoons across the world, and reflects on what it means to follow in their footsteps in the present.”—Daniela Bleichmar, author of
Visual Voyages: Images of Latin American Nature from Columbus to Darwin
