The Rarest of the Rare: Stories Behind the Treasures at the Harvard Museum of Natural History |
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The Rarest of the Rare: Stories Behind the Treasures at the Harvard Museum of Natural History
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by Nancy Pick and Mark Sloan
Sales Rank: 334842
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Discount: 32 %
List Price: $22.95
$15.61
At Amazon
on 6-17-2008.
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Features
Cover Type: Hard Cover with 192 pages
Published by: Collins October 26, 2004
Written in: English
ISBN 10 Number: 0060537183
ISBN 13 Number: 978-0060537180
Book Dimensions:
9.4 x 8.2 x 0.8 inches
Weighs: 1.8 pounds
From Publishers Weekly
Rather like a natural history museum, this book contains arresting visuals and intriguing facts but has a vaguely musty air about it. Pick, a staff writer for the Harvard Museum of Natural History, traces the growth of the institution and the accretion of its millions of animal, vegetable, fossil and mineral specimens, asserting the continuing relevance of collecting and studying whole organisms in this age of molecular biology. (As Harvard entomologist Edward O. Wilson writes in the introduction, "Biology could not have advanced without the collections of museums like this one.") The bulk of the book is devoted to photographs of flora and fauna (or rather, their taxidermied or fossilized remains), accompanied by matter-of-fact commentary about their biology or provenance. Stuffed birds, pickled turtle embryos and tapeworms taken from the intestinal tracts of "upper-crust Bostonians" share space with a haunting fossil butterfly and an awesome plesiosaur skull. Other relics, though, fail to impress: Vladimir Nabokov's collection of butterfly genitalia, for instance, probably requirements to be seen in person. The most interesting sections are those that delve into the science behind the specimens, such as the mini-essays on exotic animals and the physics of blue coloration, but these, too, are cursory and rare. 95 color photographs not seen by PW.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
A sampling from the twenty million specimens closeted at the Harvard Museum of Natural History, the several dozen plants, animals, and minerals presented here were selected for their connections to interesting tales. The associations are sometimes either famous or bizarre, such as a woodpecker collected by Meriwether Lewis or a mastodon skeleton acquired by a Harvard professor hanged for the 1849 murder of a fellow don. Pick's choices, however, stem from the desire to depict her institution's two-century-long role in the history of biology. E. O. Wilson's introduction details the course of natural history from taxonomic description to molecular biology to evolutionary biology; Pick prefaces the main text with an essay detailing the fluctuations in the museum's reputation. Aided by Sloan's great photographs, Pick then groups specimens into extinct species, species discovered by museum scientists, or specimens studied by world-famous Harvard scientists such as Ernst Mayr and the late Stephen Jay Gould. This work is a gorgeous showcase that will arrest the interest of every passing browser. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Reader Reviews
This is a gem of a book. A rare combination of science, history, and photography. The book presents the history of Harvard's Museum of Natural History and the great scientific treasures it holds. Nancy Pick's wonderful writing style includes historical information on how the specimens came into the collection and on the scientific importance of these specimens. You get to see material collected by Lewis and Clark, Captain Cook, Darwin, Nabokov, and many, many others. There is something here for everybody: birds, insects, orchids, mammals, fishes, reptiles, etc. This is truly an outstanding book.
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The Rarest of the Rare: Stories Behind the Treasures at the Harvard Museum of Natural History
Available from Amazon
Price: $15.61
Updated on 6-17-2008.
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