An orgy of staining slides

At the New York Sun, Deborah Cohen reviews Virginia Nicholson's Singled Out: How Two Million Women Survived Without Men After the First World War.

Also in this issue: Eric Ormsby on Craig Childs' The Animal Dialogues: Uncommon Encounters in the Wild. This book sounds quite lovely:

[H]e breaks the ice not only with pumas and porcupines but with mosquitoes, wasps, and praying mantises. Of Mr. Childs, it might be said, inverting the old adage, that "nothing inhuman is alien to him." His efforts, occasionally as comical as they are foolhardy, tend to misfire. He may say, "I recognize myself in ravens," but those shrewd "theatrical birds," as he aptly calls them, don't return the favor.

And here's a bit more, of Ormsby quoting Childs:

Mr. Childs also mounts a refreshing and spirited defense of anthropomorphism, a much-discredited viewpoint nowadays. As he says:

We are asked to temper our language when speaking of animal traits, lest we call them by a name that is not theirs, forming words in our mouths that do not sound like a snake's whisper, a grasshopper's clicking. It seems just as odd, though, to sequester ourselves in a cheerless vault of sentience, sole proprietors of smarts and charm. Bees form a mind of a hive, don't they? Doesn't the bear dream when it sleeps, and don't grasses stretch with all their might toward the sun?