For the layperson willing to persist, a delightful window into the very human enterprise that helped shape our current...
A superabundance of detail on the biology of the platypus, which made its debut European appearance as a hide preserved in a keg of spirits—and landed smack in the middle of the scientific debate over the classification of species, confounding naturalists throughout the 19th century.
In the era that was “destined to become the great century of classification and the decoding of the complex, and diversifying, book of Nature,” the platypus proved a tantalizing puzzle. Moyal, scientific historian and founder of the Independent Scholars’ Association of Australia, has found an object worthy of obsession in the history of the “elusive duck-bill mole.” With admirable focus, she has devoted herself to teasing out the theories and general bewilderment that the platypus engendered in the European and Australian naturalist communities, and through scientists’ efforts and opinions, Moyal provides a fount of information about the habits and behavior of the shy creature. Although reported in detail that is at times bewildering for those not wholly captivated by the back and forth of the great platypus debates, it’s nonetheless charming to witness the author’s enchantment with all the minutiae of the battles, dead-end theories, and large personalities of the major players. The great, familiar names—Darwin, Linnaeus, Lamarck—appear, as do their lesser-known contemporaries: Buffon, “hyperactive” Frenchman and “that greatest enemy of arrangement”; St. Hilaire, who inquired, “If these are mammary glands, where is the butter?”; Richard Owen, who had “brains enough to fill two hats”; and Burrell, designer of the first “platypusary.” Moyal brings the whole to vivid life, detailing the fruitless field expeditions and the under-appreciated contributions of the aborigines, and unearthing numerous bits of historic verse devoted to the platypus and its confounding structure: “O! Thou prehistoric link / kin to beaver, rooster, skink / Duck, mole, adder, monkey, fox / Paleozoic paradox!”
For the layperson willing to persist, a delightful window into the very human enterprise that helped shape our current theories of evolution.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-56098-977-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2001
Loads of good explaining, with reminders, time and again, of how much remains unknown, neatly putting the death of science...
Bryson (I'm a Stranger Here Myself, 1999, etc.), a man who knows how to track down an explanation and make it confess, asks the hard questions of science—e.g., how did things get to be the way they are?—and, when possible, provides answers.
As he once went about making English intelligible, Bryson now attempts the same with the great moments of science, both the ideas themselves and their genesis, to resounding success. Piqued by his own ignorance on these matters, he’s egged on even more so by the people who’ve figured out—or think they’ve figured out—such things as what is in the center of the Earth. So he goes exploring, in the library and in company with scientists at work today, to get a grip on a range of topics from subatomic particles to cosmology. The aim is to deliver reports on these subjects in terms anyone can understand, and for the most part, it works. The most difficult is the nonintuitive material—time as part of space, say, or proteins inventing themselves spontaneously, without direction—and the quantum leaps unusual minds have made: as J.B.S. Haldane once put it, “The universe is not only queerer than we suppose; it is queerer than we can suppose.” Mostly, though, Bryson renders clear the evolution of continental drift, atomic structure, singularity, the extinction of the dinosaur, and a mighty host of other subjects in self-contained chapters that can be taken at a bite, rather than read wholesale. He delivers the human-interest angle on the scientists, and he keeps the reader laughing and willing to forge ahead, even over their heads: the human body, for instance, harboring enough energy “to explode with the force of thirty very large hydrogen bombs, assuming you knew how to liberate it and really wished to make a point.”
Loads of good explaining, with reminders, time and again, of how much remains unknown, neatly putting the death of science into perspective.Pub Date: May 6, 2003
ISBN: 0-7679-0817-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
BOOK TO SCREEN
The Johnstown Flood was one of the greatest natural disasters of all time (actually manmade, since it was precipitated by a wealthy country club dam which had long been the source of justified misgivings). This then is a routine rundown of the catastrophe of May 31st, 1889, the biggest news story since Lincoln's murder in which thousands died. The most interesting incidental: a baby floated unharmed in its cradle for eighty miles.... Perhaps of local interest-but it lacks the Lord-ly touch.
Pub Date: March 18, 1968
ISBN: 0671207148
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1968
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