The first professionally researched miscellany guide to the animal kingdom, packed with fascinating and bizarre facts_ Did you know that the male flour beetle is the only animal which can mate and impregnate a female he has never met?_ That virgin male butterflies make better lovers than more experienced ones?_ Or that rats can learn the difference between Dutch and Japanese?Why Do Moths Drink Elephants' Tears? is an entertaining and addictive collection of eclectic insights and unusual facts, detailing the wondrous diversity of animal life that surrounds us.

Most people think of small insects fluttering harmlessly around lights when they think of moths. However, there are some moths with a sinister secret. They use their barbed tongues to poke animals in the eyes and drink their tears. Different species like different animals’ tears, such as elephants or birds. Readers will discover all sorts of disgusting facts about moths. You will never look at a moth the same way again!

A collection of animal trivia focusing on the unusual or bizarre includes such examples as the sexual prowess of virgin male butterflies, the role of eyeballs in enabling frogs to swallow, and the fighting styles of deer as evidenced by their horn shape.

Cows have best friends.Goats have accents.A group of pugs is called a grumble.The manakin bird can do the moonwalk.The Chinese for seal translates in "ocean panther."Otters have a little pouch to keep their favourite rock.An octopus will never forget a face.Zebras can't sleep alone.Because of how a pig's eyes are placed, they can never see the sky.Butterflies taste everything they walk on.

This work is a revised and expanded edition of Quammen's first book of nonfiction, and reprints some of his best-loved "Natural Acts" columns, which first appeared in "Outside" magazine in the early 1980s.

Frances Kuffel wasn’t a Victoria’s Secret model, but she wasn’t so bad. Why couldn’t she find her Mr. Right? As Shakespeare said, the course of true love never did run smooth, but for Kuffel, it seemed like one pothole after another… In this sharp and irreverent memoir, Frances Kuffel recalls her quest to replace her on-again, off-again lover with someone new and preferably less unstable. Fifty-three and never married, Frances opens her mind to all possibilities. She goes out with an Orthodox Jew, is almost the victim of a scammer, stays out all night with a man twenty years her junior, encounters feeding fetishes and shoe fetishes, and generally reads a lot of strange emails. Brazenly honest and insightful, Kuffel comes through the experience with a new understanding of love and realizes that what she wants is not necessarily a knight in shining armor. She’d be perfectly happy with someone who’ll spend hours buying antique teacups with her, thinks two dogs are not enough, and wants to be in her life through the good and the bad. And once she finally figures out what she’s looking for, the only challenge left is to find it…

A New York Times Notable Book Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award A personal, lyrical narrative about storytelling and empathy, from the author of Orwell's Roses Apricots. Her mother's disintegrating memory. An invitation to Iceland. Illness. These are Rebecca Solnit's raw materials, but The Faraway Nearby goes beyond her own life, as she spirals out into the stories she heard and read—from fairy tales to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein—that helped her navigate her difficult passge. Solnit takes us into the lives of others—an arctic cannibal, the young Che Guevara among the leprosy afflicted, a blues musician, an Icelandic artist and her labyrinth—to understand warmth and coldness, kindness and imagination, decay and transformation, making art and making self. This captivating, exquisitely written exploration of the forces that connect us and the way we tell our stories is a tour de force of association, a marvelous Russian doll of a book that is a fitting companion to Solnit's much-loved A Field Guide to Getting Lost.