Now, here's my criticism: Wendy Williams - for god's sake, do you not see how you are gendering the people you write about? Male scientists are introduced with the fact that they like coffee, or enjoy touching octopuses. The pages have a slight deckle edge, and have that lovely uneven, old fashioned look. The book itself is also beautifully designed: the dust jacket is cream colored, firm weight, and slightly nacreous, like a nautilus shell, but underneath the book cover is oily, inky, glossy black.
This sits really uneasily with me, particularly in the context of discussing how intelligent they are. An octopus has its brain split into two hemispheres (alive) before being taught to associate a particular stimulus with an electric shock: "when it saw the ball. Some squid get their heads cut off with scissors (alive) before being dissected (still alive) so we can see how their brains work. More on neurobiology than I had anticipated, but when has that ever been a bad thing? I was a little disturbed by the casual cruelty shown to the cephalopods in the book.
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