Chaucer’s Books will present a talk by evolutionary biologist Dr. Barbara Natterson-Horowitz, and award-winning science writer Kathryn Bowers, 7 p.m. Monday, Sept. 30, at the bookstore, 3321 State St.. Santa Barbara.

The authors have created an new way of thinking about the crucial, vulnerable and exhilarating phase of life between childhood and adulthood across the animal kingdom.

In their critically acclaimed bestseller, Zoobiquity, the authors revealed the essential connection between human and animal health. In Wildhood, they turn the same eye-opening, species-spanning lens to adolescent young adult life.

Traveling around the world and drawing from their latest research, they find the same four universal challenges are faced by every adolescent human and animal on earth: how to be safe, how to navigate hierarchy; how to court potential mates; and how to feed oneself. Safety. Status. Sex. Self-reliance.

How human and animal adolescents and young adults confront the challenges of wildhood shapes their adult destinies.

A star review in Booklist calls the book: “An incredibly fascinating read, Wildhood illuminates what humans can learn from the animal world and how all species are more connected to one another than they may appear.”

Dr. Natterson-Horowitz, is a visiting professor at Harvard University in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology. She is also professor of medicine/cardiology at UCLA where she co-founded the Evolutionary Medicine program. She is coauthor of Zoobiquity and Wildhood.

Bowers is a science journalist who has taught medical narrative and comparative literature at UCLA. She’s a Future Tense Fellow at New America in Washington, DC, and was an editor at Zócalo Public Square in Los Angeles. She is the coauthor of Zoobiquity and Wildhood.

— Mary Hershey for Chaucer’s Books.

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