In the
New York Times, reviewer Lucy Cooke wrote a generous rave of a review:
“This isn’t just a brilliant book about bugs. For almost a decade, Margonelli scrutinized the scientists and their work with the same forensic gaze they themselves applied to the insects. The result is a rare longitudinal insight into the slippery nature of scientific progress. “It was boring, risky, lonely, cerebral. And where termites were concerned undeniably trippy.” Watching an experiment in which termites are fed fluorescent water becomes “a decadent, Day-Glo, Warholian scene: eusociality as some kind of incestuous insect rave.”
In this hallucinogenic haze humans become ever more like termites to Margonelli; the termite mound a metaphor for brains, science and the complexity of existence. “Mounds became everything that mattered to me: The meaning of life. The key to the future. A parable about the interplay between the organized narratives of stories and the multilayered data and process that is science.”
