Features
- Cover Type: Hard Cover with 272 pages
- Published by: W. W. Norton; Rev Exp edition March 17, 2008
- Written in: English
- ISBN 10 Number: 0393058050
- ISBN 13 Number: 978-0393058055
-
Book Dimensions:
8.3 x 5.8 x 1.3 inches
- Weighs: 1.2 pounds
Product Review
David Quammen is a naturalist, writer, and literary scholar who can turn from William Faulkner to theories of demographic stochasticity on a dime--or a comma.
Natural Acts, a collection of Quammen's columns by the same name from
Outside magazine, highlights his many interests. In its pages, he touches on Malthusian population dynamics, the mating habits of butterflies and snakes, Tycho Brahe's quest for the stars, magnolia trees, whales, and deserts--to name just a few of the matters that pass beneath his bemused gaze. This is humanely wrought science writing at its best.
--Gregory McNamee
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Quammen's writing style is so delightful that his content could almost be secondary. Happily, the author (most recently of The Reluctant Mr. Darwin) and his subjects are equally engaging: from a light-hearted trope on crows, whom he surmises are "too intelligent for their station in life"; to the dead-serious issue of human cloning, which he labels "perniciously stupid"; to a harrowing 453-day adventure in a remote Congolese forest Quammen shared with explorer J. Michael Fay. A revised and expanded version of the out-of-print 1985 original, this volume reprints a number of Quammen's columns from Outside magazine along with more lengthy articles culled from sources like Audubon, National Geographic and Smithsonian, including a solid selection of his post-1985 work. In his introduction he describes the new version as "a chimerical creature, like a griffin, bird-shaped in front with a mammalian caboose," but his topics-and his tone-aren't always so whimsical; in "Planet of Weeds," a 1998 piece published in Harper's, he predicts man-made ecological catastrophe: "Homo sapiens itself is the consummate weed." A book to ponder and enjoy.
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Reader Reviews
This review is from: Natural Acts (Hardcover)
Having read many science and nature writers, this was my first experience reading Quammen. I was thrilled. Quammen is a fabulous writer. This book is a collection of Quammen's essays on topics ranging from Sea Cucumber to cockroaches to crows to amimal rights to deserts to rivers to turtles and much more. I doubt if you'll find such a rich, diverse and eclectic collection of natural writings anywhere else. Must read and own.
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