DISCOVERIES

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The Jungle Law

A Novel

Victoria Vinton

MacAdam/Cage: 304 pp., $25

IN 1892, with very little money and a pregnant wife, Rudyard Kipling moved to southern Vermont, to an old farmstead near Brattleboro, where he planned (for he was always a dreamer) to build a great house.

One can imagine, as author Victoria Vinton does in her new novel, “The Jungle Law,” that Kipling was something of an oddity to the hardworking locals, with his stories of India, his fine clothing and his various toys, including a bicycle.

It was in Vermont that Kipling began working on “The Jungle Book,” an incongruity that tested his imagination in the snowy fields.

Vinton has Kipling telling his stories of Mowgli and friends to an 11-year-old neighbor, Joe Connolly, whose fondness for the British writer and his strange household makes his own, haunted father jealous. While Kipling longs for frangipani and the hills of Simla, Joe struggles to free himself from the abuse his father heaps on him.

“The Jungle Law” is a simmering book of small acts of violence, disappointments and the undeniable power of Kipling’s stories.

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Monkeyluv

And Other Essays on

Our Lives as Animals

Robert M. Sapolsky

Scribner: 210 pp., $24

“SOMETIMES all you need to do is think a thought and you change the functioning of virtually every cell in your body,” writes Robert M. Sapolsky, a professor of neurology and biology at Stanford University.

The author of “Monkeyluv,” an entertaining collection of essays about humans and animals, is also a luminary among that rare breed -- the funny scientist. Funny is an understatement: Sapolsky draws many of his examples from the first 2 inches of the increasingly shallow human consciousness. “One of the most important issues facing our troubled planet,” he writes in an essay on the physiology of genes, is “who gets into People magazine’s special issue on the fifty most beautiful people in the world.”

Sapolsky’s mission is to show “just how little genes have to do with the biology of who we are.” The interactions of gene and environment are so important that you “can’t be taught the biologist secret handshake until you use [that idea] in conversation at least once a day.”

Other essays -- on genetic wars between men and women, dreams, bad moods, ambiguity and stress -- are written in the same vein, a combination of Oliver Sacks and David Foster Wallace.

Sapolsky is that professor whose classes were impossible to get into, the courses where the students had an infuriatingly good time while they were learning, the ones where the students were inspired to become scientists.

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In the Company of Crows and Ravens

John M. Marzluff and Tony Angell

Foreword by Paul R. Ehrlich

Yale University Press: 384 pp., $30

IT’S hard these days to believe that our presence, toxic as it may seem to be for so much of nature, is beneficial to any species. But John M. Marzluff tells us how crows and ravens have become entwined in our social habits, mythology and culture.

“In the Company of Crows and Ravens” shows that, like sparrows and pigeons, these birds live in our cities, forming pairs, roaming for food, defending their territories and even changing our behavior with their habits and antics (including dive-bombing predators and hiding shiny objects).

With the aid of Tony Angell’s more than 100 sleek, evocative illustrations -- a mysterious light seems to come directly from the eyes and feathers of these birds -- Marzluff describes human and crow interactions in places such as Tokyo. There a growing mischievous population of jungle crows is vandalizing cemeteries for food left as graveside offerings and carrying away small zoo animals.

Learning how to slow down and observe the animals around us is one simple way to form a stronger bond with nature. “In the Company of Crows and Ravens” is a subtle and beautiful reminder of this simple truth.