Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law

Mary Roach always offers absorbing, entertaining science, and Fuzz, all about “when wild animals break laws intended for people,” delivers the funny and fascinating goods — full of facts, wry wit, and important commentary on the ways animals and humans (in all their goodness and not-so-goodness) can coexist. Recommended By Gigi L., Powells.com

What's to be done about a jaywalking moose? A bear caught breaking and entering? A murderous tree? Three hundred years ago, animals that broke the law would be assigned legal representation and put on trial. These days, as New York Times bestselling author Mary Roach discovers, the answers are best found not in jurisprudence but in science: the curious science of human-wildlife conflict, a discipline at the crossroads of human behavior and wildlife biology.
 
Roach tags along with animal-attack forensics investigators, human-elephant conflict specialists, bear managers, and danger tree faller blasters. Intrepid as ever, she travels from leopard-terrorized hamlets in the Indian Himalaya to St. Peter's Square in the early hours before the pope arrives for Easter Mass, when vandal gulls swoop in to destroy the elaborate floral display. She taste-tests rat bait, learns how to install a vulture effigy, and gets mugged by a macaque.

Combining little-known forensic science and conservation genetics with a motley cast of laser scarecrows, langur impersonators, and trespassing squirrels, Roach reveals as much about humanity as about nature's lawbreakers. When it comes to problem wildlife, she finds, humans are more often the problem—and the solution. Fascinating, witty, and humane, Fuzz offers hope for compassionate coexistence in our ever-expanding human habitat.

"There is much to enjoy about Mary Roach — her infectious awe for quirky science and its nerdy adherents, her one-liners... She is beloved, and justifiably so." Jon Ronson, New York Times Book Review

"Our most consistently entertaining science journalist... Roach goes where other writers wouldn't dare... And her search produces images — a kind of technopoetry — that are hard to forget." O, The Oprah Magazine

"[Mary Roach] is a bold, tenacious, and insatiable reporter... [She] has a knack for posing the embarrassing, nonlinear and too obvious questions that others are always afraid to ask." Pamela Paul, New York Times Book Review

"Nobody does weird science quite like [Mary Roach]." Lexi Pandell, Wired

Mary Roach is the author of six best-selling works of nonfiction, including Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal, and, most recently, Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War. Her writing has appeared in Outside, National Geographic, and the New York Times Magazine, among other publications.