What are hedgehogs? Are they hogs? Rodents? Tiny porcupines? They’re none of those. Hedgehogs are one of the most unique mammals in the world. Although shy around people, these little critters have been known to warm up to people who keep them as pets. This book is filled with amazing close-up photographs of wild and domestic hedgehogs. Readers are sure to enjoy this informative yet fun guide to one of the world’s cutest creatures.

For readers of The Smartest Guys in the Room and When Genius Failed, the definitive take on Brian Hunter, John Arnold, Amaranth Advisors, and the largest hedge fund collapse in history At its peak, hedge fund Amaranth Advisors LLC had more than $9 billion in assets. A few weeks later, it completely collapsed. The disaster was largely triggered by one man: thirty-two-year-old hotshot trader Brian Hunter. His high-risk bets on natural gas prices bankrupted his firm and destroyed his career, while John Arnold, his rival at competitor fund Centaurus, emerged as the highest-paid trader on Wall Street. Meticulously researched and character-driven, Hedge Hogs is a riveting fly-on-the-wall account of the largest hedge fund collapse in history: a blistering tale of the recent past that explains our precarious present . . . and may predict our future. Using emails, instant messages, court testimony, and exclusive interviews, securities analyst turned investigative reporter Barbara T. Dreyfuss charts the colliding paths of these two charismatic traders who dominated the speculative energy market. We follow Brian Hunter, the Canadian farm boy and elbows-out high school basketball star, as he achieves phenomenal early success, only to see his ambition, greed, and hubris precipitate his downfall. Set in relief is the journey of John Arnold, whose mild manner, sophisticated tastes, and low profile belied his own ferocious competitive streak. As the two clash, hundreds of millions of dollars in pension and endowment money is imperiled, with devastating public consequences. Hedge Hogs takes you behind closed doors into the shadowy world of hedge funds, the unregulated wild side of finance, where over-the-top parties and lavish perks abound and billions of dollars of other people’s money are in the hands of a tiny elite. Dreyfuss traces the rise of this freewheeling industry while detailing the decades of bank, hedge fund, and commodity deregulation that turned Wall Street into a speculative casino. A gripping saga peppered with fast money, vivid characters, and high drama, Hedge Hogs is also an important and timely cautionary tale—a vivisection of a financial system jeopardized by reckless practices, watered-down regulation, and loopholes in government oversight, just waiting for the next bust. Praise for Hedge Hogs “Regulators, legislators and judges inclined to sympathize with the industry ought to rush out and buy a copy of Barbara Dreyfuss’s Hedge Hogs, a wonderfully instructive tale about Amaranth Advisors. . . . Dreyfuss, a Wall Street analyst turned investigative journalist, not only plowed through what turned out to be a treasure trove of official records and transcripts, but supplemented it with plenty of her own reporting. She manages to organize it all into a tight, riveting and understandable yarn.”—The Washington Post “Clearly and entertainingly told . . . a salutary example of how traders who believe they are super-smart might be nothing more than lucky, and how there is nothing so intoxicating as the ability to speculate with other people’s money.”—The Economist “[Dreyfuss] does a great job of putting Amaranth’s out-of-control trader into historical context, explaining the blitz of deregulation that set the stage for someone like Hunter to do maximum damage.”—Bloomberg “The definitive take on the largest hedge fund collapse in history . . . You will not be able to put it down.”—Frank Partnoy, author of F.I.A.S.C.O. and Infectious Greed Named One of the Top 10 Business & Economics Books of the Season by Publishers Weekly

What are hedgehogs? Are they hogs? Rodents? Tiny porcupines? They're none of those. Hedgehogs are one of the most unique mammals in the world. Although shy around people, these little critters have been known to warm up to people who keep them as pets. This book is filled with amazing close-up photographs of wild and domestic hedgehogs. Readers are sure to enjoy this informative yet fun guide to one of the world's cutest creatures.

How our understanding of and relationship to hedgehogs reveals the complex interactions between culture, technology, bodies, conservation, and care for other animals. Across the globe, the bumbling hedgehog has been framed in a variety of ways throughout history—as a symbol of both good and bad luck, of transformation, of vengeance, and of wit and reincarnation. In recent years, it has also, in different parts of the world, been viewed as a pest for its predation on ground-nesting birds and has thus become a target for culling. In Hedgehogs, Killing, and Kindness, Laura McLauchlan explores how human actors have interacted with hedgehogs and other species through time and attends to the questions these interactions raise when it comes to ending and preserving life in the name of species conservation and wildlife rehabilitation. Grounded in rich empirical material and careful critique, Hedgehogs, Killing, and Kindness traces the author’s own more-than-human transformative experience and elucidates how care is shaped by and shapes various cultural and material forces. McLauchlan urges us to rethink and reflect on how cares are normalized, and at what and whose expense; what it might mean to care in more responsive ways; and finally, whether it is possible to kill with kindness in this rapidly changing and conflicting world. A valuable addition to the understanding and practices of multispecies ethnography, environmental anthropology, and the broader environmental humanities, this book sheds a necessary light on the fraught space between caring for and killing to care for other-than-human animals on our one precious planet.

"The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." This ancient Greek aphorism, preserved in a fragment from the poet Archilochus, describes the central thesis of Isaiah Berlin's masterly essay on Leo Tolstoy and the philosophy of history, the subject of the epilogue to War and Peace. Although there have been many interpretations of the adage, Berlin uses it to mark a fundamental distinction between human beings who are fascinated by the infinite variety of things and those who relate everything to a central, all-embracing system. Applied to Tolstoy, the saying illuminates a paradox that helps explain his philosophy of history: Tolstoy was a fox, but believed in being a hedgehog. One of Berlin's most celebrated works, this extraordinary essay offers profound insights about Tolstoy, historical understanding, and human psychology. This new edition features a revised text that supplants all previous versions, English translations of the many passages in foreign languages, a new foreword in which Berlin biographer Michael Ignatieff explains the enduring appeal of Berlin's essay, and a new appendix that provides rich context, including excerpts from reviews and Berlin's letters, as well as a startling new interpretation of Archilochus's epigram.

An ode to the humble hedgehog from a lifelong obsessive. Exploring what hedgehogs actually do and what they tell us about our need for wildlife and the changes in the British countryside, The Hedgehog's Dilemma travels from the Outer Hebridees via the American Hedgehog Festival, Sonic the Hedgeghog and Mrs Tiggywinkle, to a field in Shropshire, where Hugh Warwick's love of hedgehogs began.