Swimming with piranhas at feeding time: my life doing dumb stuff with animals.

New York: WW Norton & Co, 2009.
Octavo, dustwrapper, 300 pp.

WAS $35. Led by an award-winning nature writer, this book takes the reader on a thrilling journey deep in to the domains of strange - and often dangerous - animals. Richard Conniff examines the lives of two-, four-, six- and eight-legged creatures, providing adventure-packed accounts of his many ill-advised forays into the animal kingdom. He pulls a huge snapping turtle out of a Louisiana bayou, tracks leopards with iKung San hunters in the Namibian desert and travels through the Himalayas in pursuit of tigers and the mythical migur. He flings chicken carcasses into piranha-infested waters to check how quickly they disappear before diving in himself and encounters a man stung by 120 different species of insects, ranking their pain the way that Robert Parker ranks a wine. Again and again, Conniff courts the most dangerous animals and lives to tell the tale. This collection offers a rare chance to accompany him and see life through the lens of a bona-fide field naturalist.