Howard Ensign Evans (1919–2002)

Outstanding. Even though fifty years have gone by, there is a lot of great entomology and ecology in this book. The author pretty much focuses on a different group in each chapter. How locust swarms come about, femme fatale fireflies luring males of other species, indestructible cockroaches, these and many other phenomena are examined with humor and authority.
He never talks down to the reader , nor does he dumb things down.
It’s like having a great conversation (or ten) with your favorite professor.… (más)

This book would be good for intermediate students. This book is "The Real Story of Stone Soup" written by Ying Chang Compestine, illustrated by Stephane Jorisch, and published in 2007. I really enjoyed this book. This book is about a tale of how stone soup came to be and how the Chang brothers stopped for lunch after fishing all day and forgot all the ingredient and cooking supplies. They then were creative and used different types of stones and sand and other natural supplies to make soup and in the end they had some delicious soup and everyone was amazed how the stones tuned into real food. I think I would have this in my class because it is a folktale from a different culture and tells about a fun tale from a long time ago and also shares a recipe for real stone soup that you can make today. This could also be used to teach about what a folktale is.… (más)

A classic introduction to entomology with both natural history and discussion of famous and then recent laboratory work. The book’s chapters are each on a separate type of insect or bug including springtails, cockroaches, dragonflies, crickets, fireflies, butterflies, house flies, bedbugs, locusts, and the author’s specialty parasitic wasps. As the author reports, Louis Agassiz said, The possibilities of existence run so deeply into the extravagant that there is scarcely any conception too extraordinary for Nature to realize. Evans reminds us that we are all travelers on a fragile ship, and that we are destroying it at a faster and faster rate. The original publication is copyright 1968. My copy was reissued in 1993 with a new preface and epilogue. The author reports, and probably added in 1993 that:

We also know that our burning of fuels over the last century has caused a 14% increase in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. This has already caused a slight general increase in temperature, and it is postulated that by the year 2000 global temperatures may have increased by as much as 4 degrees ....This may have strange effects on weather patterns and may melt parts of the Antarctic ice sheet....… (más)