《Vanishing Treasures》作者：Katherine Rundell【EPUB】

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内容简介：

The world is more astonishing, more miraculous, and more wonderful than our wildest imaginings. In this brilliant and passionately persuasive book, Katherine Rundell takes us on a globe-spanning tour of the world's most awe-inspiring animals currently facing extinction.

Consider the seahorse: couples mate for life and meet each morning for a dance, pirouetting and changing colors before going their separate ways, to dance again the next day. The American wood frog survives winter by allowing itself to freeze solid, its heartbeat slowing until it stops altogether. Come spring, the heart kick-starts itself spontaneously back to life. As for the lemur, it lives in matriarchal troops led by an alpha female (it’s not unusual for female ring-tailed lemurs to slap males across the face when they become aggressive). Whenever they are cold or frightened, they group together in what’s known as a lemur ball, paws and tails intertwined, to form a furry mass as big as a bicycle wheel.

But each of these extraordinary animals is endangered or holds a sub-species that is endangered. This urgent, inspiring book of essays dedicated to 23 unusual and underappreciated creatures is a clarion call insisting that we look at the world around us with new eyes—to see the magic of the animals we live among, their unknown histories and capabilities, and above all how lucky we are to tread the same ground as such vanishing treasures.

Beautifully illustrated, and full of inimitable wit and intellect, Vanishing Treasures is a chance to be awestruck and lovestruck, to reckon with the beauty of the world, its fragility, and its strangeness.

作者简介：

Katherine Rundell is a bestselling writer and a Fellow of St Catherine's College, Oxford. Her books have sold millions of copies, been translated into 40 languages and have won, among others, the Baillie Gifford Prize for non-fiction, the Boston Globe Horn Book Award, the Waterstones Book of the Year, the Costa Children's Book Award, the Andersen Prize in Italy and Le Prix Sorcières in France. She lives mostly in London and a little in Oxford, where she works on research into the Renaissance poet John Donne and occasionally goes climbing on rooftops late at night.