Author(s): Hannah Holmes

Popular Science

The Well-Dressed Ape is a gleeful naturalist's extensive, profound, and entertaining biological description of a much-vaunted mammal, the human, including a treasure-trove of factoids about every species that shares this planet with us, and fresh answers to age-old human questions: Who are we, animally speaking? How do we compare? Where do we fit in? Science journalist Hannah Holmes wryly adopts the format of a biologist's boilerplate description of an animal, with chapters for Diet, Habitat, Reproduction, and so on, to describe our species in comparison to every other. Yet even as she exposes our animal nature, Holmes discovers that Homo sapiens exhibits some traits and behaviours found in no other animal on earth. Trying to understand ourselves is, after all, one of those things that only humans do.