Ball organises 300-odd photographs not by organism but by mechanism — a chapter each for symmetry, fractals, spirals, cracks, and flow and chaos — so a wasp’s comb sits with the physics that forced it hexagonal. The pleasure is in the rhymes that arrangement exposes: a giraffe’s markings against cracked mud, an owl’s face against the eyespot on a butterfly’s wing. Coffee-table sized, and the science is doing the work.