The Trials of Life - David Attenborough

DAVID ATTENBOROUGH'S brilliant new book and BBC TV series follow Life on Earth and The Living Planet in surveying the whole animal kingdom - mites and mammals, insects, fishes, birds and reptiles all over the world - but with a difference. Whereas the earlier books were about evolution and the variety and development of animals' bodies, this one is about the way they use those bodies: how animals behave and why.

Each chapter, like each TV programme of the same title, looks at a separate stage in the life of animals. In each, Sir David shows with dramatic and often moving examples how from birth to death all animals have to solve a particular set of problems if they are to survive and eventually pass their genes to the next generation. Life is indeed a series of trials.

The crab with stinging boxing gloves, the mother bat finding her baby among 10 million others, the cleaner-fish whose customers queue up in the sea, the lion who kills the cubs of a rival, the navigating ant and the viper that is a caterpillar - all behave as they do for the same ultimate reason.

The book ends a trilogy begun 11 years ago with Life on Earth, which Desmond Morris called
"Quite simply the best introduction to natural history ever written", and Konrad Lorenz "An achievement of the artist's eye and the poet's pen." At the same time it is an admirably clear and attractive introduction to this youngest branch of the natural sciences.

David Attenborough wrote the text, and chose the colour photographs to illustrate it, at the same time as making the films. The book and programmes complement each other.