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Richard’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Richard’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
Richard Conniff’s Followers (83)
317 books
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458 friends
21 books
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540 friends
1,316 books
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440 friends
166 books
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124 friends
53 books
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14 friends
29 books
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59 friends
305 books
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100 friends
1 book
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183 friends
More friends…
Richard Conniff
Goodreads Author
Born
Jersey City, NJ, The United States
Member Since
May 2012
How to Get Bitten by a Black Mamba
Plan carefully and keep your camera close at hand.
by Richard Conniff12–15 minutes
A black mamba sinks its fangs into the photographer. (Photo: Mark Laita)With apologies to readers who have already seen this piece on my substack, I want to reprint it here because the original account appeared on Strange Behaviors 12 years ago, and left behind a frustrating mystery. Here the mystery gets belatedl
Read more of this blog post »
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The Species Seekers: Heroes, Fools, and the Mad Pursuit of Life on Earth
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published
2010
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13 editions
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The Natural History of the Rich: A Field Guide
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published
2002
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15 editions
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Swimming with Piranhas at Feeding Time: My Life Doing Dumb Stuff with Animals
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published
2009
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8 editions
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Spineless Wonders: Strange Tales from the Invertebrate World
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published
1996
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13 editions
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The Ape in the Corner Office: How to Make Friends, Win Fights and Work Smarter by Understanding Human Nature
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published
2005
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20 editions
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Every Creeping Thing: True Tales of Faintly Repulsive Wildlife
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published
1998
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8 editions
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House of Lost Worlds: Dinosaurs, Dynasties, and the Story of Life on Earth
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published
2016
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4 editions
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Ending Epidemics: A History of Escape from Contagion
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published
2023
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7 editions
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Rats! The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
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published
2002
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5 editions
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The Devil's Book of Verse: Masters of the Poison Pen from Ancient Times to the Present Day
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published
1983
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2 editions
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Richard’s Recent Updates
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Richard
rated a book really liked it
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The world he describes, and the abundance of species, feel now like a piece of the nineteenth century, though written in the 1920s. Beston has a remarkable eye for color, which shows up everywhere here. The narration by Barry Brett was unobtrusive. |
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Richard
rated a book liked it
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| I read this because it was a favorite of my children when they were growing up. Not my sort of book (hence three stars), but I found the subject matter, about children yearning for a father lost on the other side of the universe, touching. I was away ...more | |
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Richard
rated a book liked it
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| This book reminded me of many key players in wrecking the Republican party and the nation. But it just felt like a list, a grab bag, one terrible thing after another, without enough analysis or at least color. Good as a reference work, maybe, but not ...more | |
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Richard
rated a book it was ok
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| This 54-year-old novel got a wildly enthusiastic review in the New York Times on being reissued last fall. As I was reading the book, I began to suspect the reviewer was the author's daughter. I made it through 168 pages hoping to find something memo ...more | |
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Richard
rated a book liked it
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| Well written and researched but an almost completely familiar story. Millard brings well-earned attention to Sidi Mubarak Bombay, generally neglected in European accounts, as perhaps the great African explorer of the nineteenth century. But otherwise ...more | |
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Richard
rated a book it was amazing
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| Such a fine intimate portrait of a love affair between two bright young English people in 1962, the beginning of the birth control pill and the last year, or one of them, in a buttoned-up time when there was no language for talking about intimate fee ...more | |
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Richard
is starting On Chesil Beach
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Richard
rated a book really liked it
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| A fine novel about a renowned Austrian filmmaker achieving the mindless mindfulness, or maybe mindful mindlessness, of artistic creativity, becoming accustomed to the resulting acclaim, and thus, after a failed attempt to translate his success to Ame ...more | |
“Once randomly aggressive behavior gets started in an organization, it tends to be contagious, rapidly spreading itself because of a built-in mammalian device for relieving stress, called redirected aggression. Stanford physiologist Robert Sapolsky describes it this way:“Numerous psychoendocrine studies show that in a stressful or frustrating circumstance, the magnitude of the subsequent stress-response is decreased if the organism is provided with an outlet for frustration. For example, the [glucocorticoid] secretion triggered by electric shock in a rat is diminished if the rat is provided with a bar of wood to gnaw on, a running wheel, or, as one of the most effective outlets, access to another rat to bite.”
― The Ape in the Corner Office: How to Make Friends, Win Fights and Work Smarter by Understanding Human Nature
― The Ape in the Corner Office: How to Make Friends, Win Fights and Work Smarter by Understanding Human Nature
“Wildlife is and should be useless in the same way art, music, poetry and even sports are useless. They are useless in the sense that they do nothing more than raise our spirits, make us laugh or cry, frighten, disturb and delight us. They connect us not just to what’s weird, different, other, but to a world where we humans do not matter nearly as much as we like to think.
And that should be enough.”
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And that should be enough.”
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Topics Mentioning This Author
| topics | posts | views | last activity | |
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The Seasonal Read...:
WINTER CHALLENGE 2009-2010 COMPLETED TASKS
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3143 | 3268 | Feb 28, 2010 09:02PM | |
| You'll love this ...: Sara's Low-Octane Alphabet Quest | 27 | 84 | Mar 22, 2013 07:04AM | |
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The Seasonal Read...:
Winter Challenge 2013: Completed Tasks (Do Not Delete Posts)
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2478 | 656 | Feb 28, 2014 09:00PM | |
| The History Book ...: ARCHIVE - SPOILER THREAD - SEPTEMBER - GLOSSARY - THE SIXTH EXTINCTION | 22 | 50 | Sep 17, 2015 10:04AM | |
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You'll love this ...:
New Purchases - 2015
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1214 | 204 | Dec 31, 2015 11:57AM | |
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The Seasonal Read...:
Spring Challenge 2016: Completed Tasks:PLEASE DO NOT DELETE ANY POSTS IN THIS THREAD
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2923 | 530 | May 31, 2016 09:02PM | |
| Nothing But Readi...: Ashley's Reading Challenges | 165 | 213 | Jan 07, 2019 05:11PM | |
| The Book Vipers: * Last book(s) you acquired | 1293 | 512 | Jan 29, 2020 10:25AM | |
| Nothing But Readi...: To-Read Weight Loss Challenge | 133 | 1013 | Apr 24, 2024 02:53PM |
