David Attenborough reveals a secret universe - it is teeming with life and is all around us, yet we never see it. It is the world of the very small, and it is a world of sex, drugs and violence. Here David shows us not just bugs, beetles and creepy-crawlies, but scorpions and centipedes, mites and mantids, spiders and dragonflies. And not just life in the undergrowth, but the dramatic battles between predator and prey that are happening in the corner of your living room and in your larder. See magnificent spectacles: swarming antler moths; millions of desert locusts; a mountain of locusts. For every pound of humans on Earth, there are 300 pounds of insects.

2007-09-26 Read alone or with the series

'Life in the undergrowth' can be read either as an accompaniment to the TV series or as a standalone book. There are sufficient additions and deviations from the series to allow you to further your knowledge, while still following the same basic route so that it can be read alongside watching it. At the same time it covers everything the series does and never mentions or reverts back to it, so you don't miss-out on anything if you never watched the show.

One of the most startling things about the book is its format. I was expecting something resembling an encyclopaedia with several mini-headings dotted about each page along with a small paragraph and picture. Instead I found that the book reads much like a novel. There is a chapter for each episode which is written in continuous paragraphs. This makes the reading is more fluid and you understand relationships between different species more easily. Also Attenborough's unique conversational style comes across much better than I imagine it would in other formats. However this layout can get a little dry and there are few natural breaks between chapters.

A typical double page spread consists of one page of text and another page filled with a photograph with a caption in the margin. There are sometimes variations but if you measured how much of the book was taken up by words and pictures I think it would be almost exactly even. The photographs are of course superb, the clarity and detail defying belief. They all feature the behaviour talked about in the text which leaves little to the imagination. Many are taken as stills from the series, but there are others that never featured on TV.

Overall this is a fascinating book, very well written and structured. It can become a bit dry even with the pictures and I struggled to maintain concentration towards the end, but I ended up even more fascinating about life in the undergrowth.