My review of Marlene Zuk's Paleofantasy in the Guardian
About...
Peter Forbes is a science writer with a special interest in the relationship between art and science. He initially trained as a chemist and worked in pharmaceutical and popular natural history publishing, whilst writing poems, and articles for magazines such as New Scientist and World Medicine. He has written numerous articles and reviews, many specializing in the relation between the arts and science, for the Guardian, Independent, The Times, Daily Mail, Financial Times, Scientific American, New Scientist, World Medicine, Modern Painters, New Statesman, and other magazines.
He was editor of the Poetry Society's Poetry Review from 1986-2002 and played a major role in the rise of the New Generation Poets. He has edited three anthologies: Scanning the Century: The Penguin Book of the Twentieth Century in Poetry (Viking, 1999), We Have Come Through (Bloodaxe, 2003) and All the Poems You Need to Say I Do (Picador, 2004). In 2001 he published a translation of Primo Levi's The Search for Roots (Penguin Press). The Gecko’s Foot, a book on the new science of bio-inspired materials, was published by Fourth Estate in 2005 and was long-listed for the Aventis Prize. His new book, Dazzled and Deceived: Mimicry and camouflage, is published by Yale University Press. He is currently Royal Literary Fund Fellow at St George's, University of London.
AGENT: Andrew Lownie
Thanks to Rafi O'Dwyer for webwork.
Dazzled and Deceived won the 2011 Warwick Prize for Writing. Peter Forbes discusses the book with the chair of the Warwick judges Michael Rosen.
Dazzled and Deceived tells the story of mimicry and camouflage in the natural world and how one thing got to look like another. Woven into the story is the work of naturalist who became convinced that nature's camouflage was the key to camouflage in human warfare. And then there are the artists who were fascinated by mimicry in nature and who also were drawn to camouflage in the wars.
"As Forbes shows in his remarkable book . . mimicry is not just 'a fantastical tale of visual punning in nature'."
Guardian
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Natural History
UK Butterflies
History of War
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