Lucy Cooke is an award-winning broadcaster and filmmaker with a Masters in zoology from Oxford university (where she was tutored by Richard Dawkins). She began her career working behind the scenes in television comedy but is now an increasingly familiar face on natural history TV, having presented prime time series for BBC, ITV and National Geographic. She writes for the Telegraph and the Huffington Post. Her only previous book (a picture book about sloths - A Little Book of Sloth) was a New York Times bestseller.
A bloody fabulous read. Thoroughly recommend. -- Sue Perkins (Twitter) A riot of facts....Cooke scores a series of goals with style and panache. * The Times * Beautifully written, meticulously researched, with the science often couched in outrageous asides, this is a splendid read. In fact, I cannot remember when I last enjoyed a non-fiction work so much. * Daily Express * Best science pick. Sigmund Freud's first paper involved the dissection of eels in an attempt to locate their testes. To his frustration, Freud failed to find any. The eel's life cycle remains slippery, notes natural-history broadcaster Lucy Cooke in her deeply researched, sassily written history of the biggest misconceptions, mistakes and myths we've concocted about the animal kingdom , spread by figures from Aristotle to Walt Disney. Other chapters spotlight the sloth, vulture, hippopotamus, panda, chimpanzee and others, and dismantle anthropocentric cliches with scientific, global evidence. * Nature * Lucy Cooke's The Unexpected Truth About Animals was a joy from beginning to end. Who could resist a writer who argues that penguins have been pulling the wool over our eyes for years, and that, far from being cute and gregarious, they are actually pathologically unpleasant necrophiliacs? * Guardian *