The Lives of Flies

The Book Review

The New York Times

Books, Arts

4.2 • 3.7K Ratings

🗓️ 9 July 2021

⏱️ 45 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Jonathan Balcombe talks about "Super Fly," and Marjorie Ingall discusses Holocaust literature for children.

Transcript

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0:00.0	What's so special about flies? Jonathan Balcon will be here to talk about his latest
0:12.4	book Superfly. What's wrong with most Holocaust books for children? Marjorie Ingle will
0:19.7	join us to make a case for better books about Judaism for kids. Plus my colleagues and
0:24.7	I will talk about what we're reading. This is the Booker V. podcast from The New York Times.
0:31.5	It's July 9th. I'm Pamela Paul.
0:44.4	Jonathan Balcon joins us now from Bellville, Ontario. His latest book is called Superfly.
0:50.1	The unexpected lives of the world's most successful insects. Jonathan, thanks for being here.
0:55.6	Good to be here Pamela. I have to ask immediately about that subtitle. Why successful?
1:01.7	It's not greatest. It's not most exciting or most helpful. It's successful. What is success for a fly?
1:09.1	Well, I'd say a number of measures, their diversity for one, there's over 160,000 described species
1:16.4	and it's important to add that qualifier described because it's estimated there may be about five
1:21.2	times that many that are undescribed and consider just how numerous flies are and insects. Insects
1:28.4	make up 80% of all animal species on the planet. So that says something right there about how
1:33.2	incredibly successful they are and flies are arguably the most species rich subset of insects.
1:40.7	It's estimated that there's about 20 million flies on earth at the beginning of a moment for every
1:44.9	human who's on the earth and they occupy all seven continents. So those are just some of the
1:49.6	measures by which we might conclude that flies are enormously successful. See all of those numbers
1:54.7	to me are horrifying and I guess flies to me are the other stuff of horror movies and also a very
2:00.6	good short science fiction story on which those movies are made. What was the draw for you to look
2:06.7	at flies this extensively and write an entire book about them? The fact that they are so unpopular
2:12.0	is one draw for me. I love to explore unpopular animals and usually when one does that one finds
2:17.7	many reasons to like them. In the case of flies we should recognize that they are vital pollinators,
	...

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