A funny view of the very worst members of the animal kingdom whose continued existence is not necessarily a foregone conclusion.

Zoologically accurate, yet hilarious, these forty brief, witty essays include distinctions between Stoats and Ermines, reasons why the Age of Reptiles simply had to come to an end, and all you need to know about creatures from the Carp to the Giant Ground Sloth. Our guide is New Yorker humorist Will Cuppy, a perennially perturbed hermit who thought life was out to get him. He may have been right.

For eight years, from 1921 to 1929, Will Cuppy lived alone on Jones Island, off Long Island's South Shore. From that outpost, he gained a reputation for his factual but funny magazine articles and wrote the book, How to be a Hermit

, his first bestseller. His last, The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody

, was left unfinished after Cuppy's death in 1949 and has become a classic of American humor. In between (among other titles) was this very funny bestiary is for the naturalist-and curmudgeon-in all of us.