Wonderful book. I enjoyed this immensely. Gigliotti took her time to do proper research on animal intelligence, empathy, learning skills, and creativity. While the book is about animal creativity, we do get a lot of information and examples of animals thinking abstractly, memorizing information, and using that information for future situations. Gigliotti writes about a lot of different animals, and how they express their intelligence and creativity. The second chapter focuses on animal communication, and that is my favorite chapter. Gigliotti gives an example of the complex language of prairie dogs, and how they might have their version of grammar. She highlights the importance of understanding communication in context, rather than forcing animals to learn our language. She tries to tell us the important lesson of stepping out of our human-shaped thinking. Everything we know, and are in the process of getting to know, about animals mirrors our knowledge of ourselves. While that does give great directions on what to look for, it also puts boundaries on how much we can learn about the lives of animals.
I am impressed by this book and the amount of hard work and research Gigliotti put into this. It was about time someone wrote a book on this topic. I recommend this to all the biologists out there, and others who are interested in expanding their horizons.
(Thank you to Edelweiss for the review copy.)