Vanishing Treasures: A Bestiary of Extraordinary Endangered Creatures

A Most Anticipated Book from Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Parade.com, & Literary Hub - From the award-winning author Katherine Rundell comes a "rare and magical book" (Bill Bryson) reckoning with the vanishing wonders of our natural world

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.

Publisher: Doubleday Books
Published: 11/12/2024
Pages: 224
ISBN: 9780385550826


Review Citation(s):
Kirkus Reviews 08/01/2024
Library Journal 06/01/2024 pg. 16
Publishers Weekly 09/02/2024

About the Author
KATHERINE RUNDELL is a Fellow of St Catherine's College, Oxford. She is the author of Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne, which won the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, and Why You Should Read Children's Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise. Her multi-award-winning novels for children have been translated into more than forty languages and sold over two million copies worldwide. She has written for, among others, the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, the New York Review of Books, and the New York Times, about books, the natural world and night climbing.