The Life of the Bee

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Summary: this is an incredible book
Review: i found a copy of this in london, just hoping for something to keep me occupied while i was traveling. it turned out to be one of the best books i've ever read. an utterly unique view of the world - the bee's and our own.

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Summary: Tell Us More Mr. Science
Review: Not enough people read Maeterlinck today and this is a shame: the man was, unlike some Nobel prize winners in literature, truly a fantastic writer with a uniquely tuned, sharp, comprehensively philosophical but never didactic mind. Coming from a well-to-do Belgian family in the age before Television, Radio, and all the other usually destructive distractions of today, the young Maeterlinck had beekeeping for his principal hobby (just ask even your high-I.Q. high-schooler today ANYTHING about the life of bees and ants and other social insects and you'll be amazed at how little they know, in spite of the 'Discovery' Channel and all the documentary films made about the subject and shown on TV), and inspired by the essays of Fabre, began a period of amateur observation and experiment with his apiary, finally publishing the results in 1901, at the age of 39, as "Life of the Bee." Written in a highly poetic style that blended fact, imagination, and mystical speculation, it became the single most popular book ever written about insect life. Not that there aren't errors in Maeterlinck's observations that subsequent research corrected, but as far as the QUALITY OF WRITING is concerned, no one else can even come close to these amazing descriptions: in fact, some of the best written passages in all of literature are in this book.