BROADSIDES FROM THE OTHER ORDERS, A Book of Bugs
By Sue Hubbell
Random House, 1993
Category: Nonfiction for Grownups
I ‘met’ Sue Hubbell when I read A BOOK OF BEES, and was enchanted by both her forthright style and the interesting way she sees the world. So, when I stumbled upon BROADSIDES FROM THE OTHER ORDERS while traipsing around the 595s at the library—in Dewey-speak, that’s the section for bugs—I couldn’t leave without it.
BROADSIDES is creative non-fiction at it’s finest, at least for someone like me who loves to learn about our world through the lives of interesting men and women who are out there observing it closely. Hubbell introduces us to entomologists from all across the country, and she shines as much light on their bugs as she does on their motivation.
If all this wasn’t enough to make me a Sue Hubbell fan, this was:
“I have over the course of a year and three camel-cricket generations learned something about the [crickets] in my terrarium. Each observation, however, has raised more questions than it answers, so the sum of my watching has caused me to grow in ignorance, not knowledge. None of what I have discovered has been published before, so it may be useful to record it here.”
Yep, she studies camel crickets. In her office. On her desk, in fact. And you can read what she has discovered in this enchanting little book of bugs.