Disgusting Plants

"Describes 10 disgusting plants and what makes them gross"--Title page verso.

Not all plants smell as sweet as a rose. Carrion flowers smell like rotting flesh to attract flies and other pollinators. Others, like the Venus flytrap and Nepenthes truncata, actually eat animals! Young readers will be amazed by all of the weird and disgusting plants in this interesting read.

Disgust has a strong claim to be a distinctively human emotion. But what is it to be disgusting? What unifies the class of disgusting things? Colin McGinn sets out to analyze the content of disgust, arguing that life and death are implicit in its meaning. Disgust is a kind of philosophical emotion, reflecting the human attitude to the biological world. Yet it is an emotion we strive to repress. It may have initially arisen as a method of curbing voracious human desire, which itself results from our powerful imagination. Because we feel disgust towards ourselves as a species, we are placed in a fraught emotional predicament: we admire ourselves for our achievements, but we also experience revulsion at our necessary organic nature. We are subject to an affective split. Death involves the disgusting, in the shape of the rotting corpse, and our complex attitudes towards death feed into our feelings of disgust. We are beings with a "disgust consciousness", unlike animals and gods-and we cannot shake our self-ambivalence. Existentialism and psychoanalysis sought a general theory of human emotion; this book seeks to replace them with a theory in which our primary mode of feeling centers around disgust. The Meaning of Disgust is an original study of a fascinating but neglected subject, which attempts to tell the disturbing truth about the human condition.

Plants with an appetite! In this title, readers will get a close-up look at all sorts of disgusting plants through vivid images, infographics, sidebars, and more.

Can you face the most disgusting things the world has to offer? From nauseating foods and revolting habits to jungle crawlers and stomach worms, this is your ultimate guide to maggots, giant cockroaches, and much, much more. Each vile entry includes a yuck rating and all the disgusting details you need to prepare yourself for the real-life scenario.

William Miller details our anxious relation to basic life processes; eating, excreting, fornicating, decaying, and dying. But disgust pushes beyond the flesh to vivify the larger social order with the idiom it commandeers from the sights, smells, tastes, feels, and sounds of fleshly physicality. Disgust and contempt, Miller argues, play crucial political roles in creating and maintaining social hierarchy. Democracy depends less on respect for persons than on an equal distribution of contempt. Disgust, however, signals dangerous division.

"Describes 10 disgusting places and what makes them gross"--Title page verso

Describes 10 disgusting animals and what makes them gross.