Mostly tiny, infinitely delicate, and short-lived, insects and their relatives--arthropods--nonetheless outnumber all their fellow creatures on earth. How lowly arthropods achieved this unlikely preeminence is a story deftly and colorfully told in this follow-up to the award-winning For Love of Insects . Part handbook, part field guide, part photo album, Secret Weapons chronicles the diverse and often astonishing defensive strategies that have allowed insects, spiders, scorpions, and other many-legged creatures not just to survive, but to thrive. In sixty-nine chapters, each brilliantly illustrated with photographs culled from Thomas Eisner's legendary collection, we meet a largely North American cast of arthropods--as well as a few of their kin from Australia, Europe, and Asia--and observe at firsthand the nature and extent of the defenses that lie at the root of their evolutionary success. Here are the cockroaches and termites, the carpenter ants and honeybees, and all the miniature creatures in between, deploying their sprays and venom, froth and feces, camouflage and sticky coatings. And along with a marvelous bug's-eye view of how these secret weapons actually work, here is a close-up look at the science behind them, from taxonomy to chemical formulas, as well as an appendix with instructions for studying chemical defenses at home. Whether dipped into here and there or read cover to cover, Secret Weapons will prove invaluable to hands-on researchers and amateur naturalists alike, and will captivate any reader for whom nature is a source of wonder.

Throughout the history of Western civilization, war, preparation for war, and its aftermath have dominated the use of surplus human and material resources. Yet, despite our recent history, the brute facts of military history are too often ignored by those who have instead sought to provide a more ideal understanding of the Middle Ages in Europe. This predilection for chivalry at the expense of logistics and for "just war theory" at the expense of military technology have distorted both scholarly and popular understanding of the role played by military matters in the Middle Ages. The aim of the fourteen articles reprinted here is to help provide a more balanced view, offsetting notions of romanticism and an anthropologically inspired primitivism of a Dark Age in pre-Crusade Europe. Particular topics include: the survival of Classical influences into the early Middle Ages; the strategy of castle-building in the early Angevin domains; and William the Conqueror's preparations for the invasion of England.