It had great promise. An A to Z series of essays on the most numerous, weighty, and least talked about organisms on earth chronicled by a gifted writer. I wish I could have read the whole thing, but Raffles is an anthropologist, not an entomologist. He would begin an essay with an insect story, divert to a person or people pertinent to those insects, say, China’s trained crickets, and then get lost in his own beautiful sentence constructions. In the end this book will probably appeal to those people that like the kind of nature writers who wax poetic and philosophical, but only occasionally remember to tell good stories. It felt like a book written for writers, not readers.