I recently finished reading the nonfiction book, Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law, by Mary Roach. I got it from the library at the beginning of the summer and kept chipping away at it all summer long (whenever the electronic version of the book was available from the Kent Free Library). It wasn’t much of a page-turner, but that was just as well for a book that I would read at the end of the day, winding down in bed. And it was interesting enough that I kept coming back to it.

Mary Roach is writer with a unique niche: sort of journalist, sort of humorist. I feel like I’ve read some of her stuff before, but I can’t remember exactly where. But this book was not only interesting because of Roach’s casual style (which I judged to be well-suited to summertime reading), but also because of the subject material: the points of friction between human civilization and wildlife, which are becoming more intense because of climate change and the growth of the human population on Earth.

In spite of that last sentence, Roach doesn’t have much of an axe to grind politically. She just seems to be a curious person, who notices things and tries to understand the underlying dynamics.

There’s a chapter about bears in the Rocky Mountains… And other chapters about elephants and leopards and macaques in India… Cougars in California… Douglas firs in British Columbia… Crows in the American Midwest… Albatrosses in the South Pacific… Deer in Ohio… Vultures in Florida… Gulls and Rats in Vatican City… Stoats and brushtail possums in New Zealand… Mice in Colorado… It really is kind of fascinating to see how all these different populations of living organisms interact with each other.

I thought it was especially fascinating to read about the way that the U.S. military has thrown its considerable weight into waging a war against albatrosses (which are also sometimes called goonies) on Midway Island. The military’s planes were dealing with so many bird strikes that they tried dozens of different strategies to diminish or extinguish the local population of albatrosses. They tried rifles, pistols, bazookas, mortars, carbide exploders, fire… They tried kidnapping and moving the birds’ eggs… They clubbed tens of thousands of birds to death… They tried to interfere with the albatrosses’ nesting sites with wires… fabric… mothballs… live snakes… recordings of distress and alarm calls… even bulldozers reshaping the topography! And nothing could dislodge the birds.

This was my main takeaway from the book as a whole. We humans have a lot of power, but not absolute power. We may think we have it in us to destroy or save the planet, but that’s honestly just hubris. An airman from Midway is quoted as saying, “It’s my bet that no matter what we throw at them, when it’s all over, Midway will still be the Gooney territory and ourselves only transients subject to the whims of a bird that refuses to be conquered.”

I enjoyed my reading of Fuzz, and I can recommend it to those who enjoy learning weird facts about the natural world. This book is really a survivor from my Summer of Reading Frustrations. But it’s probably not going to make it into my Top Ten Books for 2026, for whatever that’s worth.