Namadou Ndiaye
Book review “100 animals that can f*cking end you”.
Don’t buy the book, watch the tic tok, apparently he has 10 million followers.
He describes his tic toks as “traumatising people with facts about ducks and otters”.
Anyway – book review. You can read the whole 220 page book in an hour, easily.
Surprisingly good accuracy, perhaps even startlingly good accuracy. As good as David Attenborough – which is high praise indeed.
When a book about deadly animals begins with the porcupine, you know it’s not going to be a typical deadly animals book.
For me, the highlight of the book, and probably the tic toks as well, is not the facts about animals so much as the American slang. Has lots of synonyms for “dead” that aren’t in the dead parrot sketch. Four in particular stand out:
“merk”
“stat pad”
“in the newspaper”
“on a t-shirt”
“merk”, I assume means “turn you into a merkin”.
“stat pad”, I assume means added to the death statistics.
Plenty more colourful language. The moose, for example, is an “overgrown swamp donkey”. The camel is a “steroid llama”. The giant river otters are “‘roided up breast-stroking felony weasels with mob mentality”. Worth it for the slang alone.
On the negative side, some of the animals in there shouldn’t be in there. Nobody has ever been killed by a Canada goose, tamandua, Aussie magpie, white tailed dear or lynx for example. However, he is fair about saying that these aren’t deadly, just potentially very dangerous. And is also fair in downgrading some animals from deadly to not deadly, including the piranha.
Is it really true that a koala can sprint at twenty miles an hour?