NO LESS STRANGE OR WONDERFUL

Exploring a world of marvels.

Greene brings ebullient inquisitiveness to 26 illustrated essays on matters human and animal, mundane and metaphysical. With occasional interjections by children whom she counts among her friends, she investigates mysteries such as the concept of zero, the morphology of the giraffe, and natural history museum displays. About zero, she reports, “Nothingness first got a numeral in ancient India,” where, she notes, “the concept of nirvana had long since taken hold. The mystic symbol has since met all kinds of resistance. Even typewriters at first made no distinction between the elliptic numeral 0 and the circular letter O, didn’t waste a key on that.” Working at the Iowa Museum of Natural History elicits essays about a model of a sloth, which she was tasked with dressing in various holiday costumes, and a taxidermied ivory-billed woodpecker, which a visitor stole. Greene draws on a host of quirky experiences, including attending Twist and Shout, the annual balloon twisters’ convention, where a friend constructs out of balloons a halter dress like the one Marilyn Monroe wore in The Seven Year Itch. “Somehow this balloon dress, this intersection of what reads as balloon and dress and body and icon, somehow it becomes a category of its own,” Greene discovered unhappily. “Spun in bespoke bubble wrap, I am not extra protected. I feel all but canceled out.” In prose at once whimsical and poetic, Greene muses on metaphor and apophenia, or “a human tendency to see connections, to find patterns, though they aren’t really there. Pareidolia is similar, the way we make pictures out of randomness, see shapes or faces, glimpse meaning where it doesn’t actually exist.” With deftness and grace, she draws connections and meaning from her fresh take on a vibrant universe.

A delightful collection.