This visually immersive work of graphic nonfiction dives into a world where ants, cicadas, bees, and butterflies visit a library exhibition that displays their stories and humanity's connection to them throughout the ages. Kuper's thrilling visual feast layers history and science, color and design, to tell the remarkable tales of dung beetles navigating by the stars, hawk-size prehistoric dragonflies hunting prey, and mosquitoes changing the course of human history.
Kuper also illuminates pioneering naturalists, from well-known figures like E. O. Wilson and Rachel Carson to unheralded luminaries like Charles Henry Turner, the Black American scholar who documented arthropod intelligence, and Maria Sybilla Merian, the seventeenth-century German regarded as the mother of entomology.
Galvanized by the sixth extinction and the ongoing insect crisis, Kuper takes readers on an unforgettable journey.
Peter Kuper's stunning Insectopolis takes readers on a journey, traveling through time and space in the company of Earth's most underappreciated beings. Each page is lush with closely observed detail: the iridescence of a beetle's exoskeleton, the velvety wing of a moth, the shadow cast by a single ant. Visually dazzling and rich with information, it is a book that will change the way you see the world and the trillions of tiny creatures scuttling and buzzing all around us.--Lauren Redniss, author of Oak Flat and Radioactive
Insectopolis will forever change the way you look at bugs. Peter Kuper masterfully intertwines natural and social history to show how insects shaped the evolution of all life on Earth and, also, how they have helped change the course of civilization throughout millennia. With heart, wit, erudition, and a boundless sense of beauty, Kuper reveals the wonders of the often-neglected realm of arthropods while poignantly reminding us that we, humans, are but fleeting visitors in it.--Hernan Diaz, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Trust
Scientific facts are blended with cultural and historical vignettes in this beautiful book, a soon-to-be-treasured staple on the shelf of any insect lover.--Dr. Jessica L. Ware, curator and division chair of invertebrate zoology, American Museum of Natural History
Peter Kuper wrote the Eisner Award-winning Ruins and critically acclaimed adaptations of Alice in Wonderland, Heart of Darkness, and Metamorphosis. He founded the political anthology World War 3 Illustrated, writes and draws Mad magazine's Spy vs. Spy, and taught Harvard University's first class dedicated to graphic novels and comics.