The Creatures’ Guide to Caring: How Animal Parents Teach Us That Humans Were Born to Care

‘Elizabeth Preston is an engaging, brilliant, often hilarious guide to the WTF world of non-human parenting. This book is astonishing — for the breadth of Preston’s research and the eye-opening, jaw-dropping things it uncovers: dads who incubate their young in their throats and burp them out. Babies that survive by peeling and eating their mother’s skin. Gender-changing fish! Lactating male bats! The message is clear: there is no one way to be a parent. A must read for mothers (and fathers) and everyone who has one.’ -- Mary Roach, New York Times bestselling author of Replaceable You ‘Leave your anthropocentric illusions behind and join science writer Elizabeth Preston in her disarming practice of identifying with other parents, whether fish, fowl, insect or mammal. In return, you will be mightily entertained, and also likely to come away sharing Preston’s conviction that acts of caring by fathers, mothers, aunts, uncles, grandparents and caretakers of every ilk laid the groundwork for the evolution of our own peculiarly social and cooperative species, Homo sapiens.’ -- Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, author of Mother Nature and Father Time