The Octopus and the Orangutan: New Tales of Animal Intrigue, Intelligence, and Ingenuity - Softcover

Eugene Linden is an award-winning journalist and the author of The Parrot's Lament, The Future in Plain Sight, Silent Partners, and other books on animals and the environment. He has consulted for the U.S. State Department, the UN Development Program, and he is a widely traveled speaker and lecturer. In 2001, Yale University named Linden a Poynter Fellow in recognition of his writing on the environment.

Although admittedly not a scientist, Linden, the author of several books and articles about animal intelligence and environmental issues, infuses this sequel to his successful Parrot's Lament with important scientific concepts and interesting conundrums relating to animal intelligence. Entertaining and captivating anecdotes about sly octopuses, orangutan escape artists, and penguins mimicking football-playing scientists in Antarctica leaven Linden's graceful musings and also make his discussion of potentially daunting concepts such as convergent evolution or Morgan's Canon more digestible to the lay reader. In the end, elements of intelligence such as empathy, deception, communication, cooperation, and imitation between animals and their human keepers led Linden to "focus on what intelligence does." This is much more than a collection of fascinating tales of animals coping with life in human-imposed environments; it is a thoughtful exploration of the nature of intelligence in both humans and animals. Recommended for popular science collections. (Bibliography and index not seen.) Ann Forister, Roseville P.L., CA
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