I really did not know much about bats before this book. I would say it has a ton of information but it's not told in a boring text book way, which was appreicated.

I always think it is interesting to learn more about the animals in the world around us, especially if little is known about them or they are misunderstood. Bats certainly fall into the latter category, so I decided to read Yossi Yovel’s The Genius Bat.

There were parts of the book that were interesting, but it felt like just as much of the book was focused on the community of people that research bats, and the various experiments that Yovel was a part of. I think it’s great that he points out that not all experiments are successful, either because they failed or because they’re inconclusive. But I go back to the fact that I picked up this book to learn about bats, not read about the adventures and anecdotes of the people who study them.

When he is focused on the bats, much of the book is heavily focused on echolocation. To be fair, this is a trait while not entirely unique to bats, is one that many of them specialize in that makes the trait stand out for the species. But, with the exception of one type of fruit bat, none of the fruit bats utilize it, putting a heavy emphasis on something throughout the course of the book that many bats don’t actually utilize. I wish that there had been more about their biological makeup, habitats, and even the history of their relationship with humans.

Yovel also has what was for me the very distracting habit of going back and forth between two storylines within a single chapter and the only thing they share in common is bats. Chapter 12 for example, which is titled ‘On Bat Diseases’ goes back and forth between people in Yovel’s home country of Israel fighting about cutting down trees that attract bats, which has nothing to do with disease, and the “white-nose syndrome” infecting little brown bats in the United States, which is absolutely on the mark with the title.

I think there are pieces of the book that are good, and parts of the last few chapters that show how humans need to think about how the way they change the environment has an impact on bats, and look for a way to positively coexist. But I don’t think it reads cohesively, it spends too much time on humans doing research, it occasionally veers off topic altogether to look too deeply into adaptations of prey, and focuses too heavily on echolocation.

Perhaps someone more knowledgeable in the field finds all of these things a great way to have a well-rounded story about bats and the people who love them, but I was looking for a more well-rounded exploration of the species itself.

A complimentary copy of this book was provided by the publisher. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

I'll be wholly honest: I kind've applied for this on a whim, but oh, did I enjoy it. Bats are so fascinating and this was a lovely dive into their research!

This was a very well-written, interesting book. I have always liked bats but I learned a lot about them through reading the Genius Bat. I had no idea there were so many different species! Nor did I realize the depths that researchers go when observing them in the wild.

I received a free copy of, The Genius Bat, by Yossi Yovel, from the publisher and Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. I have never been a fan of bats, but the author Yossi is fascinated by bats. I did not realize how many different types of bats there are. This is an interesting read on bats, I learned a lot about them.

Review of Uncorrected Digital Galley

Join Yossi Yovel, a neurobiologist and an ecologist, to unlock the secrets of one of the most diverse groups of mammals, the bats. The author’s gift of storytelling combined with his scrupulous scientific research work together to create a fascinating picture of bats. Whether the reader is a bat aficionado or someone new to the world of these incredible mammals, the information in the pages of this captivating book is sure strengthen the reader’s understanding of the only mammal with the ability to fly.

Highly recommended.

I received a free copy of this eBook from St. Martin’s Press and NetGalley and am voluntarily leaving this review.
#TheGeniusBat #NetGalley

Exactly what it says on the tin. A wonderful exploration of bats that's both detailed and interesting. This book help my attention the entire time, and opened a new world for me. Who knew bats could be so interesting?

A very informative nonfiction book that looks at so many different aspects of bats from their eating, where they live, etc. It is an accessible nonfiction book good for both people who know nothing about bats and those that do. It left me wanting to learn more about bats and the different research studies they have been a part of.

Bats are hands down one of the most misunderstood creatures out there: demonized, underrated, and weirdly adorable (some of them look like puppies). So when I saw The Genius Bat, I knew I had to read it. And wow, it turned out to be even better than I expected.

This book is so much more than just bat facts (though it definitely has plenty of those too, like echolocation, diets, reproduction, conservation, all the good stuff). It’s part science deep dive, part love letter to bats, and part history lesson on the brilliant (and sometimes wild) minds who’ve studied them over time. Yovel does a fantastic job blending fascinating research with personal anecdotes and global adventures, making you feel like you’re out in the field tagging bats right alongside him.

What I really appreciated was how much humanity he brought into the story. It's not just “here are the facts,” it’s also “here’s how we discovered them, and here are the people (and occasionally questionable research decisions) that made it possible.” It’s thoughtful, smart, and just the right amount of nerdy.

If you’ve ever been curious about bats, or already love them like I do, then this book is a must read. It's informative without being overly dense, and it's clear Yovel loves bats as much as we do. I walked away from this even more obsessed and with a deeper appreciation for how brilliant and important these little sky puppies truly are.

Highly recommend!

Thank you to NetGalley, Yossi Yovel, and St. Martin’s Press for the eARC of this book.

I have always had a fascination with bats (come on some of the brown cave bats look like chicken nuggets in caves..how can you not find them adorable??) and was excited to see this book pop up. It was a delight to find this book held so much more to it than I thought.

This book holds no shortage of fascinating stories all about different types of bats, facts about everything from what they eat to how they use echolocation to reproduction and all the way to conservation.

Beyond learning facts about these creatures, the book holds so much rich information about the notable figures who have studied them throughout time acknowledging both where and how studies have excelled or fallen flat.

I’d absolutely recommend checking out this book if you have ever been curious or just downright love bats.

I had a hard time finishing this. It just felt super slow and I didn’t have a whole lot of motivation to read it.

I believe that this book would be perfect for a college level Biology major. While I enjoyed learning about the differences in the bats and their regions, I found it too centered on the research and the researchers for someone like myself that has had a lifetime respect for bats and their habitats. The book is extremely detailed, almost unnecessarily so.
This book would make an extraordinary textbook, Thank you to NetGalley and to St. Martin’s Press for the opportunity of reading and reviewing this book.

I love bats but don’t know as much about them as I might like, and I learned a lot from this book (Chapter 11 had a rather … interesting … revelation - of the subject of a paper by Gareth Jones). I received an Uncorrected Digital Galley from NetGalley (for which I am grateful but sad it didn’t have any photos … “[see photo insert]” instead of a photo).

Amidst all of the great information in here, we are treated to a lot of temporal (and geographical shifts) - the author talks about something in his research, then jumps to one of the famous-to-the-world-of-chiroptery … and interesting if only to me, that word is oddly not commonly used … and his (almost always male) research but we don’t always find out when that is happening until a later published paper is mentioned and dated. Then back again. I like learning about niche research and even niche-ier researchers. “[Gareth] Jones has served as a Ph.D. advisor to some sixty doctoral students (that's a lot in our world), and his research spans a huge range of fields— perhaps a wider purview than any other bat researcher.” And I was quite pleased to learn of bat conservation efforts. I lived in Texas for 14 years (not from there, never from there) and made the trip to Austin to see the Congress Avenue Bridge bats at dusk. I did not know that conservation was not the goal some forty years ago when the bats took up residence under the arches. Thank you, Merlin Tuttle for changing that.

Now, I thought some of the casual drops betrayed the “genius” moniker - one researcher thought he had eaten a bat when a child? Others were shooting bats to examine their stomach contents? It’s not all like that, mostly not all, really, but those examples and a few others were presented not in literary shock; rather, “oh, well, stuff happens”.

And then,
“His [Gerry Carter] great dream is to create a "cheater" vampire [bat, of course] who never reciprocates, never returns a favor, not even to her friends. He expects that this type of individual will gradually begin to lose any social connections that are not reciprocated. The observation of such partner losing behavior should convince anyone who is still skeptical about reciprocal altruism in vampires.”

That seems rather cruel. In so many of the stories we are shown that bats have (at least some) intelligence, why do that to them?

“As a bat researcher, you can’t lose your cool when bitten. Briskly shaking your hand, as the brain implores you to do, may cause the bat to flee but it won't advance your research. You have to remain calm as your finger is crushed between the bat's sharp fangs and try to patiently extract it. One of the oldest techniques is to blow strongly on the bat's face, and then pull your hand away quickly when it relaxes its bite for a moment.”

Don’t shake your hand. Right. That's bad. Okay. All right. Important safety tip. Thanks, Egon. (Seriously… good tip!)

For those who don’t science: “Contrary to popular conception, scientists rarely decide to precisely reenact an experiment conducted in another laboratory and whose results have already been published. Such an experiment is usually considered a waste of time and resources. If the results of the original experiment are reproduced, then there's nothing new to report, and the original researchers will forever retain credit for it. If the results are not reproduced, this sometimes is tantamount to a declaration of war, and few scientists are keen on launching a war whose results are unknown.”

This is wild: “The fact that bats change the rate of their emissions when zeroing in on insects was a strong indication of the use of echolocation for hunting purposes. In fact, this ability to change the rate is one of the tools that makes them such efficient hunters. It enables bats to adjust the rate of information collection to the task at hand.”
Admirable. Reduce the rate of incoming information, along with bat adaptation resulting in Doppler Shift Compensation

Good book.

I work giving tours of caves, so I know the importance of bats to the ecology. Bats are our friends, but because of Hollywood, people don't understand them. This book is a good one for those who want to know more about our flying mammal friends. It does have some scientific terminology, but the author does a good job of explaining those technical terms..

The only thing I found confusing was his jumping back and forth in time and between his research and that of others.. Perhaps if he had made smoother transitions it would have helped. At least there are extra spaces and graphics separating the histories.

Since I had an advanced, pre-publication version, I could not see the pictures of the various bats described, but I imagine those would help the reader know what the bats are like.

The Genius Bat by Yossi Yovel is an excellent book for a general readership with an interest in bats, or nature in general.

For the past few decades bats have become more appreciated, though admittedly not fully. More people find them interesting than when I was young and most of the uneasiness is likely due to the difficulty in truly observing, for non-researchers, bats in a way that lets us wrap our minds around them visially. You can see groups roosting, or they are zooming around, which can make some people understandably skittish. Most of us who have knowingly lived near bats (I say knowingly because most people don't realize how many bats live in their vicinity) come to appreciate them as wonders of nature, even if we don't understand a lot about how they live.

This book goes a long way toward helping us understand them, which means more likely to coexist with them rather than exterminate them. After finishing this book, I was surprised about how much I learned. I'll try to explain what I mean. First, the writing discusses the science of bats, but in plain language with plenty of analogies. We also experience different research trips, each with a specific species and goal in mind. Much of the science is mentioned casually as the foundation for each trip, so we don't feel like we are getting a lecture, just the background for a trip. Finally, all of the stories and shorter anecdotes keeps the book about the interaction of humans, bats, and our shared environment. So the science seems less "out there somewhere" and more "somewhere nearby."

If you're prone, like me, to research a little further, there are a lot of great avenues that are mentioned in the book, though more as explanations than explicit suggestions for your own research. From the beginning I went to Wilson's book on sociobiology and found myself wrapped up in the early debates, and continuing to this day, on the applicability to humans. But there are many works cited as well as mention of various species and locations, so you can find both general articles as well as scientific literature on any that really pique your interest.

Highly recommended for the general reader who enjoys learning about science and nature but doesn't want something that feels like a lecture class. This would be ideal for someone starting out in science and thinking about what path to take. It gives some ideas not just for bat research but how one can turn their interests and curiosity into legitimate areas to study. Giving this book to a high school student might just help them decide what they want to do.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.

I had a bit of a hard time getting into this book and found it overall dry and more like a text book than I was expecting. I think this will be a great book for those who are particularly interested in bats but it just wasn’t for me.

The Genius Bat
We all “know” what bats are, but do we really? How many kinds? What size? What do they eat? Where do they live? Are they blind? Yossi Yovel tells more than we thought we knew about the intelligent bat, and adds tidbits about other animals as he does so (did you know grasshoppers have ears on their front legs, and that walrus penis bones are 2 feet long)? He includes tales of expeditions to many parts of the world as he studies bats. Many bats migrate, even nightly, and many are endangered. At times the details of echolacation are a bit too detailed, but the story is still fascinating. While written for adult audiences, high school and upper elementary aged students will also enjoy this book (I will be giving it to my 12 and 16 year old grandchildren for Christmas).

This book contained many interesting facts about different species of bats, their use of echolocation, altruistic feeding habits among the vampire bat species that owing to their high metabolism must eat frequently and can starve within a day if they haven’t fed. The downside of this book that these nuggets of interesting information and a little of the science behind how this information was obtained is interspersed by a who’s who in the world of biologists and others who have done work in their field with a mini biography of each one, their mentors, trivia such as what the author ate for dinner when he was fed up with his usual fare and a whole host of irrelevant information that does not aid the reader in understanding bat biology, which is why I wanted to read this book. I made it about 2/3 of the way through before I gave up.
I received an advance copy of this book from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

I'm a fan of bats and used to rehabilitate them when I did wildlife rescue. I was excited to read this nonfiction book about them. It was fascinating to learn about species I've never heard of. There were times the book was a little too dry but otherwise, it was informative.

I enjoyed this book. While it was the story of bats, it was also a story about people; about the author and about other scientists working with bats. The book shows the interconnectivity of science and how one person’s work builds on another. There was a lot about the author’s journey, which I loved. The writing is highly conversational with a considerable amount of humour. There were great anecdotes that had me chuckling. Overall, I loved this book. Thank you to Netgalley and St. Martin's Press for the advance reader copy.