ANIMALS STRIKE CURIOUS POSES

by Elena Passarello

(Vintage, €18.19) IN THIS elegant, wonderfully entertaining series of essays, the award-winning Elena Passarello explores our curious relationship with the natural world through a bestiary of exceptional animals.

We meet Yuka, the young woolly mammoth who died more than 35,000 years ago and lay entombed in ice until exhumed — her red-blond coat still vivid — by 21st-century tusk hunters, and Star, the starling who captivated the composer Mozart by whistling the opening bars of his recently composed Piano Concerto in G.

Passarello concludes with a moving reflection on the contradictions in human nature that have led us to ‘dispatch animals and then to miss them’ — driving species to extinction and then seeking to recreate them by genetic manipulation.