Gonzo Ichthyology: A Graphic Guide

Love is a UCSB marine biologist and foremost ichthyologist on the West Coast. Eggers is an artist whose haunting fish drawings live somewhere between M.C. Escher and Aubrey Beardsley. Together they have produced a 288-page graphic guide to fish biology — anatomy, reproduction, evolution, behavior, the history of ichthyology, piscine sex, fishy violence — that refuses at every turn to be what a science textbook is supposed to be. Chapter subtitles include 'Two Girls for Every Boy,' 'The Curse of Physoclistous Bladders,' and 'Just in Case You Needed It, Here Is More Proof that Gaia Must Have Been Smoking the Ganj.' One entire spread draws a sustained comparison between the life of Argentinian dictator Juan Perón and great moments in ichthyological history. The form is the argument: that science is not the solemn transfer of information from authority to student but a living, strange, joyful encounter with the actual world, and that a book about fish can be a work of art that also teaches you everything you need to know about fish. Love has been making this argument his entire career — his previous book was called Certainly More Than You Want to Know about the Fishes of the Pacific Coast: A Postmodern Experience. The most DoCR book on the Make Something Better shelf: a scientist who refused to let the form of the thing dictate what the thing could be.