Animal Crackers

Laugh? Well, just a little. Too rich a diet of awful humour would sour anyone’s stomach. And Edward Kanze tries much too hard in Wild Life: The Remarkable Lives of Ordinary animals (Crown, $21, ISBN 0 517 70169 3). He’s fine on the vomiting vultures and cannibalistic shrews but too often he resorts to self-indulgent name-dropping and grating puns. A definite no no. The pictures are nice though.