William Hartston

A wonderfully entertaining celebration of that most unique of creatures: the sloth. In public estimation, sloths have undergone an astonishing transformation in the course of the past few years. Thanks largely to YouTube clips posted by the sloth orphanage in Costa Rica, sloths have attracted a vast audience of admirers. Instead of seeing them as ridiculous anachronisms of which we know little, they have turned into creatures considered by many to be the most endearing on earth. Over much the same period, scientific investigations have also changed our view of sloths. No longer are they seen as total misfits in the modern world but, in the words of one specialist sloth investigator, they are 'masters of an alternative lifestyle'. In this wonderfully entertaining celebration of this most unique of creatures, William Hartston reveals the fascinating history of the sloth, from the prehistoric ground sloth to modern pygmy sloths in Panama, explores the current state of the science of sloths and reveals the truth behind sloth behaviour.

How old is the sloth? How do sloths have sex?How did a sloth save Dublin?The answers to these questions, and more, are found in this wonderfully entertaining celebration of the sloth. Walking readers through the sloth's evolutionary history - from the prehistoric ground sloth to modern pygmy - William Hartston reveals the sloth's fascinating journey from maligned mammal to cause celebre. Playfully peppered with science and filled with factoids, Sloths is a love-letter to the most anachronistic, and just a little bit ridiculous, of animals.

A delightful and witty treasure trove of utterly useless information by the author of The Things That Nobody Knows. Most encyclopaedias are boring. They are so packed with worthy but dull facts that a great deal of weird and wonderful material is squeezed out. The Encyclopaedia of Everything Else takes the opposite approach and leaves out all the dreary stuff you can find elsewhere. The result is the most fascinating, astonishing, varied and utterly useless collection of information ever assembled and organized between two covers. From aardvark tooth bracelets to the genus of tropical weevils known as Zyzzyva, via Mark Twain's views about cabbages, this is a quarter of a million words of sublime pointlessness.