Interview with Seirian Sumner, author of Endless Forms: The Secret World of Wasps
Seirian Sumner, author of Endless Forms: The Secret World of Wasps recommends a brilliant group of books! Before jumping into the interview, please check out Seirian's book:
Review from Book Depository:
Where bees and ants have long been the darlings of the insect world, wasps are much older, cleverer and more diverse. They are the bee's evolutionary ancestors - flying 100 million years earlier - and today they are just as essential for the survival of our environment. A bee, ecologist Professor Seirian Sumner argues, is just a wasp that has forgotten how to hunt.
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Endless Forms: The Secret World of Wasps
For readers of Entangled Life, Other Minds and The Gospel of Eels, this is a book to upturn your expectations about one overlooked animal and the wider architecture of our natural world.
With endless surprises, this book might teach you about the wasps that spend their entire lives sealed inside a fig, about stinging wasps, about parasitic wasps, about wasps that turn cockroaches into living zombies, about how wasps taught us to make paper.
It offers up a maligned insect in all its diverse, unexpected splendour; as both predator and pollinator, the wasp is an essential pest controller worldwide. Inside their sophisticated social worlds is the best model we have for the earth's major evolutionary transitions. In their understudied biology are clues to progressing medicine, including a possible cure for cancer.
The closer you look at these spurned, winged insects - both custodians and bouncers of our planet - the more you see. Their secrets have so far gone mostly untapped, but the potential of the wasp is endless.
Buy On:
Easons €28.00
Book Depository €19.73
Waterstones £17.99
Wordery $20.50
Q. Do you have a favourite smart thinking book (and why that book)?
Oh gosh, it's hard to pick one! Review From Book Depository:
Why stories make us human and how to tell them better.
There have been many attempts to understand what makes a good story - but few have used a scientific approach.
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I loved Will Storr's The Science of StoryTelling. Telling stories is not just for the fiction writer - to be an engaging writer you need to tell a story too. This book is a bible for writers. I think this book had a huge influence on my approach in writing my first book, Endless Forms.
The Science of Storytelling
In this incisive, thought-provoking book, award-winning writer Will Storr demonstrates how master storytellers manipulate and compel us.
Applying dazzling psychological research and cutting-edge neuroscience to the foundations of our myths and archetypes, he shows how we can use these tools to tell better stories - and make sense of our chaotic modern world.
Buy On:
Book Depository €9.74
Waterstones £9.99
Wordery $11.29
Q. What's the most recent smart thinking book you've read (and how would you rate it)?
I just finished The Social Instinct, by Nichola Raihani. Actually it's the second time I'd read it, because it's so good! She weaves a pithy narrative to explain how we - humans - are not so special.. parallels of our social behaviour can be found throughout the animal kingdom, and even in how genomes cooperate. It's an important book that should be read by everyone. Five stars!
Review From Book Depository:
Why cooperate? This may be the most important scientific question we have ever, and will ever, face.
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The Social Instinct: How Cooperation Shaped the World
The science of cooperation tells us not only how we got here, but also where we might end up. Cooperation explains how strands of DNA gave rise to modern-day nation states. It defines our extraordinary ecological success as well as many of the most surprising features of what make us human: not only why we live in families, why we have grandmothers and why women experience the menopause, but also why we become paranoid and jealous, and why we cheat.
Nichola Raihani also introduces us to other species who, like us, live and work together. From the pied babblers of the Kalahari to the cleaner fish of the Great Barrier Reef, they happen to be some of the most fascinating and extraordinarily successful species on this planet. What do we have in common with these other species, and what is it that sets us apart?
Written at a time of global pandemic, when the challenges and importance of cooperation have never been greater, The Social Instinct is an exhilarating, far-reaching and thought-provoking journey through all life on Earth, with profound insights into what makes us human and how our societies work.
Buy On:
Easons €28.00
Book Depository €16.31
Waterstones £20.00
Wordery $21.78
Q. Do you have a favourite childhood book?
I loved the Animals of Farthing Wood - the whole series in fact. I think it's cos stomping round in the natural world was my favourite pastime as a child and the characters were so compelling and likeable.
Review From Book Depository: Farthing Wood is being bulldozed, and there's a drought. Fox, Badger, Toad, Tawny Owl, Mole and the other animals must band together and set off to a far-away nature reserve. Their journey is full of adventure and fraught with disasters, and the animals must work together to survive.
The Animals of Farthing Wood is one of the most popular animal stories in children's literature and is still in print nearly 40 years after first publication. (All links earn commission from purchases that help fund this site. Prices accurate at time of writing)
The Animals of Farthing Wood
Buy On:
Book Depository €6.99
Waterstones £6.99
Wordery $21.78
Q. Do you prefer reading on paper, Kindle or listening to an audiobook?
Paper, always paper! I spend most of the day staring at a screen - I love to hold a book in my hands. The books I read always look read! Having said that, I do find audiobooks a useful timesaver - I listen whilst I cook, clean and run.
Q. Do you have a favourite bookshop (and why that shop)?
I like to spread my book love across any bookshop I come across. But there are two that hold special palces in my heart. One is Ystwyth Books in Aberystwyth, Wales near where I grew up. I used to go there every weekend and scour the shelves for a new book. The other is the Waterstones (formerly Dillons) on Gower Street in London, mostly because it was my local bookshop as a student at UCL. But more so now as I'm back at UCL and I love nothing more than getting lost in its rambling floors.
Many thanks to Seirian for recommending a brilliant group of books! Please don't forget to check out Seirian's book Endless Forms: The Secret World of Wasps.
Daryl
Image Copyrights: HarperCollins Publishers (Endless Forms, The Science of Storytelling, The Animals of Farthing Wood), Vintage Publishing (The Social Instinct)
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