By Elizabeth Marshall Thomas
256 pages; Harper

If anthropologist Elizabeth Marshall Thomas has a chip on her shoulder (impatience with self-aggrandizing humans), she wears it with style, one reason why The Hidden Life of Deer is such testy fun. As she did in her best-seller The Hidden Life of Dogs, Thomas demonstrates the lost art of observing these creatures who display social preferences ("deer politics") and gender differences (males are careless, females cautious), while struggling, just as we do, to get on with their "astonishing, important lives."

— Cathleen Medwick