Audiobook7 hours
Waiting for Aphrodite: Journeys into the Time before Bones
Written by Sue Hubbell
Narrated by Barbara Caruso
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
4/5
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About this audiobook
After 25 years on a farm in the Ozarks, award-winning writer and naturalist Sue Hubbell moved to a small town on the coast of Maine. There, in the pools, tides, and thickets, she found a vast array of creatures that aroused her considerable curiosity. Join Hubbell on a unique tour of the world of invertebrates. From humpbacked camel crickets to glow worms, from horseshoe crabs to elegantly-furred sea mice, Hubbell offers vivid descriptions and fascinating details about these superb examples of survival. She also introduces some experts in the field-scientists who share their enthusiasm and knowledge. Waiting for Aphrodite grew from hours of field observation and reflects the days Hubbell spent at the Library of Congress augmenting her information. Entertaining for layman and scientist alike, it is both warmly personal and carefully researched. Barbara Caruso's rich voice is perfect for this eloquent, engaging book.
Author
Sue Hubbell
Sue Hubbell was the author of eight books, including A Country Year and New York Times Notable Book A Book of Bees. She wrote for The New Yorker, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Smithsonian, and Time, and was a frequent contributor to the “Hers” column of The New York Times.
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A Country Year: Living the Questions Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A Book of Bees: And How to Keep Them Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBroadsides from the Other Orders: A Book of Bugs Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
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Reviews for Waiting for Aphrodite
Rating: 3.944444422222222 out of 5 stars
4/5
27 ratings3 reviews
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5I got up to about 3/4 the way through before I put this book down for greener pastures. Who knows...I may finish it one of these days as I usually don't like leaving books unfinished. It's full of information, but I was hoping for more of a A Country Year set in Maine. Instead, very few chapters deal with the creepy-crawlies in Maine--Hubbell travels all over the world to research invertebrates. Of course other interesting issues come up as well such as global warming, evolution, and taxonomy, but I was hoping for more context to her daily life like A Country Year's approach. For those primarily interested in little critters and don't necessarily need a whole lot of other plot to keep it moving, this book is more suited for you. I needed a little more to keep me going. One thing I can say from reading this book that I never would have even considered otherwise: INVERTEBRATES RULE! Strange, but true.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This is an odd one for me to review. I loved the science portions of this book - Sue Hubbell is a very talented science writer. But, I found the biographical parts to be dragging. It might have been that Sue is writing from a recently retired persons standpoint - figuring out her future. Where I am just a decade into my career, with many years ahead of me.The science is well researched. I learned a lot about invertebrates. This book also opened my eyes to just how little humanity knows about the world around them. In some of the creatures described, the only description in a scientific article is 50 years old and very inaccurate.This book makes an excellent case for environmentalism. Not by pointing out all the bad things happening, but by showing that we know almost nothing about nature.A very good read about a subject I know very little about.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I like this memoir-style of writing about science - it puts the observer back in the picture, instead of pretending she doesn't exist. Waiting for Aphrodite is like an enriched field notebook - Hubbell starts out with the standard time, place and weather, but adds the story of how she came to be in Maine in her 60s, the kind of bicycle she rides to the beach, the geology of the northeastern coastline, and all sorts of other things which are fun to read. She goes on to a standard identification and cataloging of species found, which leads on a research flight of fancy from the Smithsonian to Brazil and back to Maine again.In this book Hubbell writes one of the more lucid descriptions of evolution by natural selection, and also throws in one of the more compelling arguments for preserving biodiversity, all the while introducing the reader to a world of mussels and camel crickets and polychaetes and the people who study them.