Book Review: Buzz

Buzz: The Nature and Necessity of Bees
Thor Hanson
Natural History

Another fine book from the author of Feathers and The Triumph of Seeds. Hanson has a gift for picking interesting subjects, and for delving into the most interesting topics within them. 

More than that, he has a gift for narrative flow. One of his better techniques, for example, is to unobtrusively shift paragraph breaks. That is, he takes what would be the conventional break-point between two related paragraphs and moves it a sentence or two ahead. (Indeed, he sometimes does the same thing at the chapter level.) Done badly, this would be incoherent--but Hanson manages to make it work; it's a way of introducing a little smidgen of suspense, of tension that's immediately resolved, into the text.

As to the content of Buzz, I defy you to read this and not start looking for bees the next time you go outdoors. They're extraordinary little critters. Not just the honeybees, either, although Hanson does necessarily devote a good deal of space to them. Sweat bees, carpenter bees, mason bees, bees with tongues longer than they are, parasitic bees, flowers that are codependent on one specific sort of bee, flowers that are actually bee escape rooms, flowers that look like female bees (guys are alike throughout the animal kingdom) . . . it's like the first time you ever walked into the American Museum of Natural History and saw the dinosaur skeletons. You can't help but say: Wow.