Tania Munz is the vice president for research and scholarship at the Linda Hall Library in Kansas City. Previously, she was a lecturer at Northwestern University and a research scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. She holds a PhD in the history of science from Princeton University.
Munz s intellectual biography of the animal ethologist Karl von Frisch records his ingenious experimental demonstrations of the honeybee s communication dances. She skillfully places the history of twentieth-century science alongside its calamitous political history in a rich texture that weaves the civic operations of the hive with the gross incivilities of Nazi science, the irenic experimentalism of von Frisch with the violence of total war, and the narrow mechanism of American behaviorism with the latitude of its European counterpart. Von Frisch is a low-key hero of modern science, and the moving story of his discovery of honeybee language is almost as remarkable as the insect itself. --Claire Preston, author of Bee