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PENGUINS appear with an alarmingly increasing frequency on everything from
Christmas cards to shower curtains. Young jugglers can learn their trade with
a set of stuffed cloth penguins; cooks can chop their onions on a penguin-
shaped board. The Penguin waddled and cursed his way through Batman’s
adventures. So why do these birds have such a grip on our imaginations? Why do
we warm towards what we once saw as a handy refill for an oil lamp? In Penguin
(Whittet Books, pp 128, £7.99 pbk), John Love explores the history of
human encounters with penguins from Vasco da Gama’s first bloody meeting in
1497 – “we killed as many as we chose” – to today’s studies of behaviour and
efforts at conservation. He discusses the survival strategies of 16 species,
marvelling at their toughness and wildly varying behaviour from burrow-
dwelling Magellanic penguins to the stalwart emperor penguin settling in for a
long winter of starvation hundreds of kilometres from the nearest food.