Volume 55, Number 7 · May 1, 2008
Queens of the Web
By Tim Flannery
The Private Life of Spiders
by Paul Hillyard
Princeton University Press, 160 pp., $29.95
Life in Cold Blood
by David Attenborough
BBC Books, 288 pp., $29.95
For some readers, the books under review may be a cause of anxiety and alarm. Arachnophobia, Paul Hillyard tells us in The Private Life of Spiders, 'is the most prevalent of all animal phobias.' Such intense fear of spiders can afflict almost anybody, and can become so extreme that one sufferer confessed that he 'couldn't even write the word spider,' or 'go into a room until someone else had checked that there were no spiders inside.' Snakes can set off a similar reaction, and it's the vivid descriptions and hundreds of close-up color photographs of legless and eight-legged creatures that may put off some readers. Yet I wish that they could overcome their irrational fears, for the phobic are deprived of the pleasure of contemplating nature's foremost living gems.
Review, 3320 words
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