A review by esessa
Never Home Alone: From Microbes to Millipedes, Camel Crickets, and Honeybees, the Natural History of Where We Live by Rob Dunn

3.0

I found this book really frustrating. I have a problem with nonfiction books that claim to be about one thing but actually aren't, and that's the case with this one. It claims to "introduce us to the nearly 200,000 species living with us in our own homes", but it doesn't do that, not nearly. It is actually a collection of accounts about scientist-author Dunn's research on a limited handful of species, some (but not all) of which happen to live in our houses. It's basically his greatest hits of his own research, and not a fully fleshed out account of what lives in our houses; I expected the book's structure to be something like a walkthrough of a typical house, stopping in each room to discuss the critters that live there (and I see from the other reviews that I wasn't alone in making this assumption). Instead, you get a disjointed series of chapters about Dunn's various projects. I suppose loosely they do have to do with species that live in our homes, but there are also, for example, chapters that focus entirely on things that happen in hospitals, or the history of microscopy. It's interesting in its own way, and I suppose at least tangentially relevant to what is supposed to be the main theme, but the blurb and description definitely aren't accurate to the contents of the book, and that irritates me. There are also numerous places where Dunn halts the narrative, such as it is, to make some observation about the noble scientific process, or the lives and toils of scientists, and those parts all came across as condescending, paternalistic, and navel-gazing. These were among the many random and obnoxious tangents he went off on, clearly based on his own interests and not on wanting to tell a cohesive story to the reader.

TLDR: be wary of books written by scientists about their own work. I say that as a scientist (apologies to my colleagues!).