The Well-Dressed Ape: A Natural History of Myself

Stiff meets Your Inner Fish in this surprising, humourous, and edifying look at our species as, essentially, animals.

Combining personal stories, cutting-edge science, and a buoyant sense of humour, Hannah Holmes offers an intriguing and fresh way to understand our place in the world.

Science journalist Hannah Holmes wryly examines the human animal, beginning with the animal she knows best: herself. What she finds is that, of course, we are indisputably animals – in some ways (smell and vision, for instance) rather inferior ones.

Yet Holmes also discovers that Homo sapiens exhibit some traits and behaviours found in no other animal on earth. Our species is among the most generous, and the most thoughtful. Not so admirably, we kill ourselves any number of ways, including by eating ourselves to death. All this in addition to a patently bizarre physical appearance, and shocking lack of defences.

Confronting the creature in the mirror, Holmes wrestles with the big questions: Are humans special at all? How different are men and women? (Very.) What is our place in the kingdom of animals – and on the planet Earth?