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When Nature Breaks the Law
by Mary Roach
Join "America's funniest science writer" (Peter Carlson, Washington Post), Mary Roach, on an irresistible investigation into the unpredictable world where wildlife and humans meet.
What's to be done about a jaywalking moose? A bear caught breaking and entering? A murderous tree? Three hundred years ago, animals that broke the law would be assigned legal representation and put on trial. These days, as New York Times best-selling author Mary Roach discovers, the answers are best found not in jurisprudence but in science: the curious science of human-wildlife conflict, a discipline at the crossroads of human behavior and wildlife biology.
Roach tags along with animal-attack forensics investigators, human-elephant conflict specialists, bear managers, and "danger tree" faller blasters. Intrepid as ever, she travels from leopard-terrorized hamlets in the Indian Himalaya to St. Peter's Square in the early hours before the pope arrives for Easter Mass, when vandal gulls swoop in to destroy the elaborate floral display. She taste-tests rat bait, learns how to install a vulture effigy, and gets mugged by a macaque.
Combining little-known forensic science and conservation genetics with a motley cast of laser scarecrows, langur impersonators, and trespassing squirrels, Roach reveals as much about humanity as about nature's lawbreakers. When it comes to "problem" wildlife, she finds, humans are more often the problem―and the solution. Fascinating, witty, and humane, Fuzz offers hope for compassionate coexistence in our ever-expanding human habitat.
12 illustrations
"Bestseller Roach sheds light on nature's malefactors in this often funny, always provocative survey of species that 'regularly commit acts that put them at odds with humans'...This eminently entertaining outing is another winner for Roach." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Roach joyfully explores how human culture and wildlife, including plant life, have either found ways to coexist or are constantly at odds...From the terrifying to the frustrating, a great starting point for understanding the animal world." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"A must-read for wildlife enthusiasts, popular science readers, and anyone who has enjoyed Roach's other books. Her occasionally awkward interactions with people and animals make for the engaging narrative style that Roach is famous for." - Library Journal (starred review)
"Hilarious! With Fuzz, Mary Roach again takes us into an unfamiliar scientific realm, in this case the science of managing the conflicts between humans and the natural world―lethal leopards, rampaging elephants, jet-downing birds, even killer trees. It's an ever-widening conflict zone, but one that Ms. Roach gleefully mines for a multitude of bizarre facts that'll make you snort coffee through your nose." - Erik Larson, bestselling author of The Splendid and the Vile
This information about Fuzz was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: John Madere
Mary Roach is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Stiff, Spook, Bonk, Gulp, Grunt, Fuzz, and Packing for Mars. Her new book, Replaceable You: Adventures in Human Anatomy, debuted in September 2025. Mary has written for National Geographic, Wired, and The New York Times Magazine, among others, and her TED talk made the TED 20 Most Watched list. She has been a guest editor for Best American Science and Nature Writing, a finalist for the Royal Society's Winton Prize, and a winner of the American Engineering Societies' journalism award, in a category for which, let's be honest, she was the sole entrant.
If you liked Fuzz, try these:
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by Carly Anne. York
Published 2025
A brilliant new voice in science writing—"witty, whip-smart, truly one of our best" (Mary Roach)—shows why playfulness and curiosity are the key to science.
by Bethany Brookshire
Published 2023
An engrossing and revealing study of why we deem certain animals "pests" and others not - from cats to rats, elephants to pigeons - and what this tells us about our own perceptions, beliefs, and actions, as well as our place in the natural world.
by Esther Woolfson
Published 2022
A landmark examination of the fraught relationship between humans and animals, taking the reader from Genesis to climate change.
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