Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter

I didn't need much convincing to read a book about those chubby, flat-tailed rodents: their industrious ingenuity has always made them among the most appealing of animals. But what Goldfarb does in his entertaining survey of the history and the current state of human-beaver relations is make a hard-to-refute case that these squat gnawers are one of the most crucial natural engineers we have, and adding them to an ecologically damaged landscape can often be the most efficient way to bring balance back to nature. This is not one of those books that reveals the hidden intelligence of an unsung animal—we know how smart beavers are! Rather, it shows, via profiles of Beaver Believers across the world, how smart we could be if we just let them do their job.