Admittedly, there are more attractive animals: Their slimy skin and bodies marked by spots and warts repel us, and their life in the swamp, with its aura of decay and stench, involuntarily reminds us of where we all eventually go. Beatrix Langner demonstrates that we should approach the toad with less disgust and more fascination in her knowledgeable and elegant natural and cultural history of the sluggish hopper. On her toad journey, she guides us through art and literature, past the dissection tables of science, and into our own gardens, illuminating these colorful creatures in the in-between realm of dry and wet, water and land, male and female. The fact that they joyfully orchestrate their reproductive fervor with trilling and croaking soundscapes should endear them to us just as much as the knowledge that they are among the oldest amphibians.