Our Wild Familiars
How Animals Are Adapting to Cities and Reshaping the Natural World
$64.91
- Hardcover
336 pages
- Release Date
18 August 2026
Summary
A dazzling journey into the hidden lives of synanthropes, the wild animals who’ve found ingenious ways to survive and thrive in human communities-from award-winning writer and scientist Dan Werb.
Synanthropes have always been an immutable part of the tapestry of our lives. They are the reason we hear birdsong in the morning and skittering throughout the day, and why we take such pains to fix lids to our garbage cans. But they are so much more than that, too- epidemic vectors, churners…
Book Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780593799635 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10: | 0593799631 |
| Author: | Dan Werb |
| Publisher: | Random House USA Inc |
| Imprint: | Random House Inc |
| Format: | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages: | 336 |
| Release Date: | 18 August 2026 |
| Weight: | 533g |
| Dimensions: | 235mm x 156mm |
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What They're Saying
Critics Review
“In Our Wild Familiars, Dan Werb invites us to explore the challenging new world of synanthropes, the plants and animals that now share our urban spaces with us. And explore it you should, if not to learn about these fascinating new relationships with nature, then simply to enjoy spectacular writing and thorough research. Highly recommended!”—Douglass Tallamy, New York Times bestselling author of Bringing Nature Home and Nature’s Best Hope
“Our Wild Familiars delivers a revealing tour of civilization’s hidden corners—the untamed niches in our human-dominated landscapes. The book is dazzling, astute, and desperately needed. At a time when the global environment hangs in the balance, Dan Werb offers a welcome message of hope. Look closely at our broken world and you’ll find resilience amid the wreckage.”—David Baron, author of The Beast in the Garden
“In a wide-ranging, delightfully surprising, and often counterintuitive survey, journalist and epidemiologist Werb examines the question of how cities change and are changed by the behavior of the undomesticated animals that make their homes in them … Dazzling insights into the cohabitants of our daily lives.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review
“[A] buoyant overview of how animals adapt to urban spaces, framing cities as sites of biodiversity and evolutionary change … Enlightening and entertaining, this is a winning snapshot of wildlife that thrives in not-so-wild spaces.”—Publishers Weekly
About The Author
Dan Werb
Dan Werb, PhD is an award-winning writer and social epidemiologist. His work, which primarily investigates the link between big events and human society, has appeared in The New York Times, TIME, Believer Magazine, and many other outlets. He is an associate professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases and Global Public Health at the University of California San Diego and in the School of Public Health at the University of Toronto. Werb is the author of two previous books, City of Omens and the award-winning The Invisible Siege.
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