According to the blur or info, on the jacket and flyleaf Wilson is one of the great naturalist biologists since Darwin. This is an easily accessible book, as much a chatty biography as a professional survey (in fact, at times a little too much of the first). It begins with the author, in the summer of 1936, staring raptly from a beach in Florida at an exotic type of jellyfish known as a sea nettle. His academic career, as you might expect, has been brilliant, but he is not a lab scientist or mere researcher; he is essentially a working naturalist, as the title says. Fieldwork can be ruthless too it seems - in his utter commitment to the current task in hand, a survey of fauna in the Florida Keys, Wilson did not hesitate to order the use of toxic sprays which killed off shore insects (it is called "defaunation") and also devastated tree life on entire small islands. The evocative drawings by Laura Simonds Southworth make amends for the many family and "official" photographs included, which belong to the genre once known as Camera Corn. A much more popularised approach to the animal and insect kingdoms is given in The Beauty of the Beastly by Natalie Angier, which deals with everything from cheetahs to worms (Abacus, £7.99 in UK).