Caspar HendersonReseñas

Caspar Henderson's modern bestiary is a masterful blending of the odd, the erudite and the philosophical. The book is an A-Z of unusual life forms that Henderson uses as a platform for fascinating digressions and musings on scientific discovery, evolution and the impact that humans have had on the world we live in. Some of his digressions are surprising - the minute winterbear gives rise to a discussion on space travel for example - but the book flows logically and never flags.

This is a sumptuous book full of line drawings, maps, photos and marginalia. Henderson's footnoting is very effective, using coloured text to guide the eye, rather than numbered superscripts. Books like this are the reason why ebooks will never entirely replace the physical form.

Science, history, philosophy, literature, poetry, art all kind of mooshed together in s book about wonder and wonderful things and ideas. As usual, I didn’t like the last couple chapters as much as the rest of it, but I’ve said that in so many of my reviews that I know it must be something about me, not the books. I guess authors sometimes save certain bits for last, and somehow those aren’t the bits I like. But I DID like the book overall.

Had weird formatting for the footnotes, they were in the margins instead of the bottom of the page. Kinda fun, kinda strange.

“This book is an attempt to better understand and imagine being and beings,” I do not think there is a better way to capture what the book is about than the one chosen by the author. Do not be fooled by the title, The Book of Barely Imagined Beings: A 21st Century Bestiary, by Caspar Henderson, is less of an encyclopedia about earth’s fauna and more of a collection of essays on history, humanity and the relation between humans and nature.

Prompted by some of the most exquisite beings known to humans, Henderson does an impressive job at correlating what makes them stand out - be that inherent characteristics or the way they are perceived by humankind - and a study of the human condition. Following the structure of a traditional bestiary, the author takes us on a journey from A to Z on how to appreciate the details of life.

Henderson’s storytelling is aided by Goulbanou Moghaddas beautiful illustrations, as well as some photographs, breaking the walls of texts and providing the reader not only with some rest between pages, but with a deeper insight of what is being said. While the book would still work without the visual aids, it would be, without a doubt, a much less pleasant experience.

Although the title could suggest otherwise, The Book of Barely Imagined Beings: A 21st Century Bestiary is not a book for those looking to know more about the animal kingdom, but for those looking to know more about humanity and how we perceive the world around us.

"… among the most important challenges facing you and me, surely, is the need to develop awareness worthy of the complexity and beauty of creation." (pg. 190)

A fascinating science book slightly diminished by some eccentricities and an occasional lack of focus. Caspar Henderson's book A New Map of Wonders begins by bursting forth like a horn of plenty, and I thought I had found a new favourite for my shelf. Henderson uses an anecdote of seeing his young daughter experience a gentle pool of sunlight in their house ("created by trillions of photons… flowing from a stupendous thermonuclear explosion tens of millions of miles away" (pg. 3)) to kick off "a journey in search of modern marvels", as the book's subtitle puts it.

This, as I said, is a horn of plenty; each page of the book, from beginning to end, contains a wealth of scientific and humanistic anecdotes that (I hope) I will remember and be thinking about for a long time. From the chimpanzees in Tanzania who were observed to routinely climb to the top of a ridge to watch the sunset, while holding hands (pg. 5), to the 2016 discovery that "plants may 'see' underground by channelling light from the surface all the way to the tips of their roots" (pg. 164), Henderson offers up an almost breathless array of awe-inspiring provocations to wonder.

It does, at times, become a bit too filling. The book can be slow-going, just because there is so much to unpick (that's an observation rather than a complaint), and there are so many interesting tangents that the broad chapter parameters – on 'light', 'life', 'the heart', 'the brain', and so on – often lack a polemical or journalistic force that they might have benefited from. Henderson's purpose for the book – "a better appreciation of both the things we wonder at and the nature of wonder itself" (pg. 3) – can often become lost to the reader, and the name-checking of 'wonder' after each long and intense ramble through the myriad discoveries of science often seem like attempts to wrestle back control of an expanding project. As a reading experience, the book is longer than its page count suggests.

This occasional lack of focus, and the sense that the book was bursting at its seams, prevented A New Map of Wonders from becoming a true favourite of mine, but in truth its genuine drawbacks are few. The environmental discussion towards the end, though worthy, was essentially a regurgitation of the new orthodoxy, at odds with the author's vivacity and originality elsewhere. Similarly, the bleak picture of the future painted in the final chapter – income inequality, climate change, automation, etc. – left me rather tired and depressed; an odd note on which to end a book about the wonders of life. Henderson also shows his political cards in this final chapter, trying to nudge the reader towards Islington-set luxury communism and denouncing Trump with the words of that well-known authority on politics, Zadie Smith (pp312-3). These objections are relative to personal taste, of course, but I for one don't like being nudged into political discussion in a science book, particularly when the author's casual dinner-party biases remain unexamined. I don't resent it, and sometimes I agree with it, but I'm just weary of every damn thing nowadays putting its two political cents into everything.

As for more objective flaws, Henderson occasionally delivers some eccentric word choices – 'kludge' and 'staggeringlier', for example. Apropos of nothing, we get the line "I reflect on a political and economic system that squcks our thrugs till all we can whupple is geep" (pg. 14), which I can only assume was included in order to win a bet. The plethora of quotations in the margins of the book derail as often as they illuminate, and have the further effect of shrinking the area for the main text. Between the small size and the frequently grey font, the book is – physically, for the eyes – taxing to read.

For the other flaws I mentioned above, such as the tangents and the rambles, the slow pace and density of the book, they are ones the reader comes to enjoy, such is the cornucopic charm of the book. Henderson's New Map might not be very useful for orienting yourself or for getting clear and accurate directions, but there is a joy in being lost, in finding new things by happenstance, new connections that you didn't expect, and this the book provides.

"… there is another dimension to what I would like to see as 'true' wonder, and that is strong cognitive engagement – an intensity of thought as well as feeling…" (pg. 216)

After many entranced carpet-hours flipping through the pages of The Grand Medieval Beastiary, I was doing the usual related/recommended book browse on the big ol' evil internet bookseller site, when I spotted this thing. The Borges nod had me interested and the description had me 1-click purchasing with money I didn't have. I don't know much of anything about Caspar Henderson, but this book is one of the best things I've read in quite a while. Using the structure and format of Ancient and Medieval beastiaries, he progresses through the alphabet, focusing on one creature pure chapter. Axolotl, Barrel Sponge, Crown of Thorns Starfish...Yeti Crab, Zebra Fish...etc. He presents current and cutting-edge scientific research on some of the most bizarre and fascinating species on earth, but what makes the book truly incredible, is Henderson's voice, his ability to articulate a kind of child-like naivety about the weird animals with whom we share the planet. I find myself thinking about this book multiple times per day, and people who spend a lot of time with me are likely becoming annoyed with my relating all things to the behaviors of obscure living creatures (and my new-found insistence that Dolphins be granted a representative at the UN). Henderson is able to offer some incredible facts, explain why they are incredible and then convince you that if you were really paying attention, your mind would be even more blown than it is. He causes me to pause and re-examine my relationship to the world around me, to hear an old familiar story with new ears, to open myself up anew to the voices that I've relegated to the background, to retrain my eyes to focus on the objects stuck in the fuzzy periphery. For that, I'm grateful and I look forward to what's next.

There was a time when humans had a natural curiosity and wonder for the world around themselves. Before Google, to find things out you actually had to go and learn them, experience them or find and read the book about it. Nowadays anyone with an interweb connection can quickly read up about anything about any subject. By having everything available at our fingertips has meant that information is transitory, read but never absorbed and more importantly as Henderson argues in this book, we have almost lost the ability to wonder.

People have wondered what is over that far hill and what lies just beyond the horizon for millennia now and the oldest form of this speculation was the map. These mappae mundi were the places where people's imaginations could run riot, full of strange and magical creatures and of unknown lands, these were the internet of the day.

Should we want to look up from the blue LED glare of our screens though there is still a universe of wonder out there? Henderson takes us on a journey through what he considers to be some of the wonders still left in the world. Beginning with light where he explores from the photon to the black hole passing under the rainbow. He then moves within our body to discover more about the workings of the heart and brain. The chapter on the physical brain leads on to the concept of self as we currently understand it.

The final two chapters and my favourites were on how we see the world then and now and the wonderfully titled Adventures with Perhapsatron. Throughout the book, there are diagrams and illustrations to complement the text and I particularly liked the use of side notes to add a little extra depth, though the grey font wasn't the easiest to read. Overall an enjoyable book.

Taking his cue from medieval bestiaries, Caspar Henderson set out to write a modern compendium of beasts, and show, in the process, that truth is a lot weirder than fiction. Forget about your griffons and basilisks, and check out things like the waterbear pictured above (in extreme close-up; they're only about half a millimetre long), the rainbow-coloured spider known as a sparklemuffin, or the aptly named thorny devil.

As so often with books about wildlife, one comes away with the sense that nature has a sexual imagination to make the Marquis de Sade look like a guileless schoolgirl. Turbellarian flatworms, for instance, ‘which are hermaphrodites, engage in spectacular penis fencing, using two phalluses mounted on their chests as weapons with which they attempt to pierce and impregnate each other’. Like prep school. And don't get me started on dolphins. Dolphins are filthy.

Dolphins court and make love the year round, and with lots of foreplay – they rub, caress, mouth and nuzzle each other's genitals. Both males and females have a genital slit, so penetration is possible in both sexes, and the penis, the tip of the nose (the beak), lower jaw, dorsal or pectoral fin, and tail fluke are all used. Female Spinner dolphins have been observed riding ‘tandem’ on each other's dorsal fin, the female beneath inserting her fin into the genital slit of the other and the two swimming together in this position. Spinner dolphins of both sexes sometimes engage in orgies of more than a dozen individuals, known as ‘wuzzles’.

Now we know why the little fuckers are always grinning. Wuzzles! This sounds like something Berlusconi's PA would be asked to set up.

A preponderance of the creatures highlighted in here are marine animals, just because the sea has so many creatures that seem completely bizarre to us, from entire separate phyla of existence.

Still, anyone coming into this book for pure zoological detail might end up disappointed, since Henderson uses his biological sketches as jumping-off points to talk about a whole range of disparate subjects, from early photography to AI to the history of human flight. Some readers have found this frustrating, but – while it's true that he can't get into much of anything in detail – this is an essay technique that should be familiar to most users of Goodreads; there are some people on here, after all, who can write a whole disquisition on neoplatonism or the internal combustion engine while purporting to review The Girl on the Train. Amidst the animal facts, then, are comments like this:

[A]s Umair Haque (2011) argues, there is a massive malfunctioning of the global economy, and at the root of the problem is ‘dumb growth’, which, ‘rather than reflecting enduring wealth creation, largely reflects the transfer of wealth: from the poor to the rich, the young to the old, tomorrow to today, and human beings to corporate persons.’

This may sound beside the point, but in fact it comes to feel like one of the guiding themes of the book. To address non-human animals at all is to address the ongoing ‘sixth extinction’, a grotesque inequality of power and influence to set alongside the economic inequalities listed above, and to which it has a more than incidental connection. This fact, and the human society and culture that has made it possible, are never far from Henderson's thoughts, and in the end to me this made his book stronger rather than weaker.½

This book took me longer than usual to read, and the bulk of that length was simply spent savoring the experience. [b: The Book of Barely Imagined Beings|13562662|The Book of Barely Imagined Beings A 21st Century Bestiary|Caspar Henderson|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1358299908s/13562662.jpg|19138344] is more than simply a bestiary. It combines facts about the various unusual creatures that live, and have lived, on our planet with the lessons we may learn from them, and how they are perceived in day to day life. It is an allegory for better living, and for a greater awareness of the diversity that characterizes our planet and how important it is.

This book has 26 chapters of animals, as well as a forward and conclusion (that concludes very little.) The chapters vary greatly in length, which makes the reading an altogether pleasurable experience. Much is drawn upon from previous chapters, although I do believe it theoretically could be read in any order one desires. I could fully understand wanting to flip to the puffer fish or honey badger chapter first (though my desire was more Quetzocoatlus focused.)

The book, read in order, presents a chronology of creation and how we developed. It shows how much has changed over time, and in turn, how much has remained the same. It's a call to action to appreciate life more fully, and responsibly, and to see beyond first impressions. Even the barrel sponge is something to marvel at, and the eye of a cuttlefish is a thing of beauty. There are wonders all around us, and we should endeavor to keep it that way.

The author started from the way the medieval bestiaries tend to be at least as much about vaguely related moral stories as about the animals being described. Big difference: the medieval authors moved on after a few pages. Henderson goes on, and on, and on, and on...

The illustrations may be of some artistic value, but they do not enhance the text, and most are so poorly printed that it is hard to tell what they depict.½

An A-Z listing of some (generally) little known creatures which the author uses as springboards for more general musings.

The author chose an eclectic and unusual sampling of animals and part of the fun of the book is seeing where he goes with them. Not a book to buy if you want detailed zoological information, but an interesting and diverting set of essays about life, the universe and everything.

The Sunday Times Books Reviewer, James McConnachie. on 23 December 2012 gave a favourable review of this book.