Gods, Wasps, and Stranglers is a book of high highs and low lows. The highs were Shanahan's obvious love and respect for his primary subject, the fig tree, and the vivid quality of his sensory descriptions. The lows were the dense scientific language, the underdeveloped point about religious and localized plant wisdom, and the narrator of the audiobook, James Cameron Stewart. Stewart's voice almost turned me off completely - while it's a perfect voice for narrating Animal Planet segments, I found it extremely hard to focus on it without any visual accompaniment.