THE GENIUS BAT: The Secret Life of the Only Flying Mammal, one of the most fascinating creatures gets its literary due

THE GENIUS BAT: The Secret Life of the Only Flying Mammal
YOSSI YOVEL
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$16.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: An awe-inspiring tour of bat world by the world’s leading expert

With nearly 1500 species, bats account for more than twenty percent of mammalian species. The most successful and most diverse group of mammals, bats come in different sizes, shapes, and colors, from the tiny bumblebee bat to the giant golden-crowned flying fox. Some bats eat fruit and nectar; others eat frogs, scorpions or fish. Vampire bats feed on blood. Bats are the only mammals that can fly; their fingers have elongated through evolution to become wings with a unique super-flexible skin membrane stretched between them. Their robust immune system is one of the reasons for their extreme longevity. A tiny bat can live for forty years.

Yossi Yovel, an ecologist and a neurobiologist, is passionate about deciphering the secrets of bats, including using AI to decipher their communication. In The Genius Bat he brings to vivid life these amazing creatures as well as the obsessive and sometime eccentric people who study them–bat scientists. From muddy rainforests, to star-covered night deserts, from guest houses in Thailand, to museum drawers full of fossils in New York, this is an eye-opening and entertaining account of a mighty mammal.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: My homeplace of Austin, Texas, has a huge population of Mexican free-tailed bats that live in the Congress Avenue Bridge; that's the way I've thought of bats as a result. Cultural icons, things to put up special habitats for, little mosquito-munching guano factories...there are caves in and around my old part of Central Texas that house colonies of the skeeter-eaters and welcome to 'em, y'all.

One of the main strands in this read was about the intense social nature of the bat as a genus. I am fascinated by their lives, so similar to ours as humans packed in together, so full of care and altruism to balance out the conflict and crowding. A neurobiologist is very much able to bring the reality of bat sociality to its most advantageous light. Author Yossi's clear fascination with and sympathy for the bat makes me feel some hope for these persecuted, threatened members of our world.

Habitat loss is a main threat to bats worldwide. These are beings with simple enough needs that humans, with our tremendous cognitive abilities, ought to be able to come up with better solutions than "watch and hope" to the issues of their protection. The book's structure, starting chapters with Author Yossi's personable, warm voice telling his own tales of events and incidents, then moving as seamlessly as I could hope for to the researches and results of others, kept me in the flow of this read.

While it is non-fiction with an advocate for the subject's point-of-view, it does not read as a hectoring or pleading or accusatory polemic. It felt to me as though a charming guest came to my living room to enjoy himself, and to express that pleasure by sharing his own experiences. It is a welcome feeling, a relaxed and...to my bat-friendly self...relaxing way to learn some really surprising new-to-me information.

I took a half-star off for some of the author's possibly-meant-as-humor slaps at people not like him.