Bird lovers and fans of well-written science history will love this revelatory and intoxicating biography.
An impressive biography of the “man who began the scientific study of birds.”
Birkhead (Animal Behavior and History of Science/Univ. of Sheffield; The Most Perfect Thing: Inside (and Outside) a Bird’s Egg, 2016, etc.) studies the life and work of a birder who was in the “right place at the right time,” Francis Willughby (1635-1672). With his good friend and tutor at Trinity College, John Ray, the two formed “one of the great partnerships in biology.” After Willughby’s death at the age of 36, Ray went on to edit and publish Willughby’s three massive, major scientific studies in Latin of fish, insects, and his “blockbuster,” Ornithology. Until now, Ray’s contributions have historically overshadowed Willughby’s. Thanks to the availability of new primary source materials, Birkhead is able to provide a “far more complete portrait” of the man who formed the foundation of a new type of natural history in general and ornithology in particular. A member of the landed gentry, Willughby received a superb university education while the scientific revolution of the 17th century was in full bloom. With a novelist’s flair for narrative, Birkhead recounts the young man’s many adventures on expeditions, often accompanied by Ray, and his groundbreaking discoveries. He describes Willughby as industrious, enthusiastic, and “evidently a nice man.” But it’s his scientific accomplishments that interest the author the most. In great detail, he examines Willughby’s vast research in fish species, bird reproduction, migration, feathers, insects, sap, classifications, chemistry, and even “a book of games.” Birkhead describes examining Willughby’s large specimen case with 1,200 compartments and finding not just a vast collection of seeds, but also 133 eggs: “During my research career I have had a few Eureka moments, but this was one of the best.”
Bird lovers and fans of well-written science history will love this revelatory and intoxicating biography.Pub Date: July 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4088-7848-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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