Weinberger’s essays are like encyclopaedias in miniature, crammed with curious details that make you wonder at the strangeness of creation, and the ability of humans to make it even stranger. Wildlife is a collection which celebrates birds and fish, dogs and flies, ticks and mole-rats, and those two legendary creatures the tiger and the rhinoceros – both highly prized, both now almost hunted to extinction. No field of human knowledge is too remote, no fact too fanciful for his purpose, which is to lay before you the world of these animals and the minds of the humans who imagine them. Weinberger’s previous collection An Elemental Thing was named by Village Voice one of the ‘20 Best Books of the Year’ and his book What I Heard About Iraq is regarded as an antiwar classic.
