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Pets: de beste dierenverhalen in en om het huis
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
October 17, 2018
Cursiefjes... best leuk.
Dekkers is verliefd op katten en haat honden, en dat zullen we geweten hebben. Voor de rest gaat deze verzameling over bizarre huisdieren zoals spinnen, luizen, vlooien, kakkerlakken, muizen, ratten, lintwormen, bacteriën, virussen, vogels die in het wild leven, en ja... ook over honden en katten en cavia's en kanaries en aquariumvissen...
Leuk leesvoer voor dooie momenten, gaatjesvulling, en daar houdt het ook bij op...
Indien Dekkers nu wat minder in katzwijm zou vallen voor katten en wat meer eerbied zou hebben voor honden... maar ja, dan zou het Dekkers niet meer zijn.
Dekkers is verliefd op katten en haat honden, en dat zullen we geweten hebben. Voor de rest gaat deze verzameling over bizarre huisdieren zoals spinnen, luizen, vlooien, kakkerlakken, muizen, ratten, lintwormen, bacteriën, virussen, vogels die in het wild leven, en ja... ook over honden en katten en cavia's en kanaries en aquariumvissen...
Leuk leesvoer voor dooie momenten, gaatjesvulling, en daar houdt het ook bij op...
Indien Dekkers nu wat minder in katzwijm zou vallen voor katten en wat meer eerbied zou hebben voor honden... maar ja, dan zou het Dekkers niet meer zijn.
January 11, 2017
Midas Dekkers likes to tell you things you'd rather not know. Such as the fact that flies are particularly attracted to human mouths and like to sit on your lips when you're asleep.
He is a well-known Dutch biologist who has presented television programmes and has written many newspaper columns that are made into collections like this one. This is the first of these books I've read and I understand why he's so popular.
Even though he likes to pick out facts to make you squirm, his stories are always interesting and often give you fascinating facts and statistics, and he has an entertaining way of presenting them, often poking fun at that strangest of animals, the human. His observations are often eye-opening, approaching life from a different angle to make you think. For example:
Why does your evening meal turn into an evening-long meal when you eat out? (p.96)
Why do we do our best to protect butterflies but are equally fanatical about killing caterpillars, then we wonder why butterflies are dying out?
Another interesting idea:
If developers had to pay for the price of the air as well as the price of the ground, they wouldn't keep building such high buildings. They'd have to build with a bigger footprint and then we would lose gardens, but people with bigger gardens tend to put buildings on them anyway. Why not have roof gardens instead on the new, wider, lower buildings? (p.118)
There was malaria in the Netherlands until 1945, particularly in Noord Holland, which includes Amsterdam. In Alkmaar, 50 % of expenditure on medicines was on quinine to cope with cases of malaria. Apparently, the larva of the malaria mosquito were actively combatted in the canals and ditches using petrol and a mysterious substance called Paris soap. There were public health campaigns encouraging people to kill the mosquitoes in their homes, where they used to do what mosquitoes do so well, bite people at night. Then, bizarrely, just before DDT became available, Dutch malaria-carrying mosquitoes abandoned people and started biting cattle instead. You have to ask yourself, did the people suddenly become less appetising or were the cattle fed something different that made them more attractive? I wonder if it has something to do with margarine? When was that introduced? No, that can't be it: margarine has been around since the 1870s and DDT was developed in the 1940s. In any case, global warming already threatens to open up more areas to the risk of malaria. I always assumed that it was too cold in Northern Europe for malarial mosquitoes. Now I hear they already here, I am not reassured!
This is the sort of factual book I really enjoy and Midas Dekkers' books will definitely be on my radar from now on.
He is a well-known Dutch biologist who has presented television programmes and has written many newspaper columns that are made into collections like this one. This is the first of these books I've read and I understand why he's so popular.
Even though he likes to pick out facts to make you squirm, his stories are always interesting and often give you fascinating facts and statistics, and he has an entertaining way of presenting them, often poking fun at that strangest of animals, the human. His observations are often eye-opening, approaching life from a different angle to make you think. For example:
Why does your evening meal turn into an evening-long meal when you eat out? (p.96)
Why do we do our best to protect butterflies but are equally fanatical about killing caterpillars, then we wonder why butterflies are dying out?
Another interesting idea:
If developers had to pay for the price of the air as well as the price of the ground, they wouldn't keep building such high buildings. They'd have to build with a bigger footprint and then we would lose gardens, but people with bigger gardens tend to put buildings on them anyway. Why not have roof gardens instead on the new, wider, lower buildings? (p.118)
There was malaria in the Netherlands until 1945, particularly in Noord Holland, which includes Amsterdam. In Alkmaar, 50 % of expenditure on medicines was on quinine to cope with cases of malaria. Apparently, the larva of the malaria mosquito were actively combatted in the canals and ditches using petrol and a mysterious substance called Paris soap. There were public health campaigns encouraging people to kill the mosquitoes in their homes, where they used to do what mosquitoes do so well, bite people at night. Then, bizarrely, just before DDT became available, Dutch malaria-carrying mosquitoes abandoned people and started biting cattle instead. You have to ask yourself, did the people suddenly become less appetising or were the cattle fed something different that made them more attractive? I wonder if it has something to do with margarine? When was that introduced? No, that can't be it: margarine has been around since the 1870s and DDT was developed in the 1940s. In any case, global warming already threatens to open up more areas to the risk of malaria. I always assumed that it was too cold in Northern Europe for malarial mosquitoes. Now I hear they already here, I am not reassured!
This is the sort of factual book I really enjoy and Midas Dekkers' books will definitely be on my radar from now on.
November 7, 2012
Zoals altijd heerlijk vermakelijk gebrabbel van midas en geklaag
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews