This delightful, gentle book is an enjoyable read, good for armchair naturalists and anyone interested in how humans interact with nature. Warwick is an environmental writer and photographer, and the book is essentially a topical memoir of his experiences with the hedgehog, a spiny brown mammal, and an essay on our relationship with hedgehogs and with nature. He gives entertaining descriptions of how hedgehogs live, the different hedgehog species, and current research, including some in which he participated. For example, he describes a project that examined the survival rate in the wild of abandoned baby hedgehogs that people raised and then released. His stories are vivid, personal, and often hilarious.

Warwick examines the effect of hedgehogs on humans and the many ways these animals appear in popular culture. The range of cultural references is wide and sometimes amusing, from connections between hedgehog characteristics and human nature (e.g., Isaiah Berlin’s essay The Hedgehog and the Fox) to Beatrix Potter’s hedgehog character Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle. While hedgehogs’ hold on the human imagination is not as great as that of dogs and cats, for example, they have a broad and devoted following.

Humans, of course, also have a huge effect on hedgehogs, and unfortunately a good deal of it involves habitat destruction or the introduction of dangers such as highways. Warwick examines this distressing and all-too-familiar story, providing information about the threats to hedgehogs and recent population trends and offering advice on how people in Great Britain can make their yards more hedgehog-friendly.

In the last chapter, he discusses the human love of and need for nature. The title of the book comes from a problem posed by Schopenhauer, who, Warwick says, wondered how a prickly animal can get close enough to another of its kind to mate without getting hurt, and by extension, how humans can balance the needs for intimacy and safety. Warwick explains that in fact hedgehog mating is not that difficult (and actually Schopenhauer’s hypothetical situation involved hedgehogs huddling together against the cold, not mating), but the metaphor is still valuable. Humans face a similar dilemma with respect to the natural world: If we all tried to live in the wilderness, close to nature, we would remove its wild character if not destroy it, but if we live in the city apart from nature, we miss it.

The separation of contemporary urban and suburban humankind from nature has attracted increasing attention lately (for example, the coining of the term “nature deficit disorder” to describe its effect on children). Warwick suggests looking no further than the hedgerow or the garden to find, in the hedgehog, a bit of the wild, something worth protecting and cherishing, something that can satisfy the deep human need for contact with wilderness. It may be hard for American audiences to find a similarly charming urban animal to aid this contact, but the underlying message about appreciating and protecting wild creatures even in human-made settings is worth heeding.

© 2009 Mary Hrovat

Mary Hrovat is a freelance science writer and editor; she has written about science and information technology for Indiana University’s Research & Creative Activity magazine, Indiana Alumni Magazine, and Discovery Online. She also posts news items, book reviews, and articles on the Thinking Meat Project [http://www.thinkingmeat.com/], which deals with brain science, psychology, human evolution, and related topics

Keywords: popular science