From the award-winning author of The Tangled Tree and The Song of the Dodo comes a collection of essays in which various weird and wonderful aspects of nature are examined. From tales of vegetarian piranha fish and voiceless dogs to the scientific search for the genes that threaten to destroy the cheetah, Quammen captures the natural world with precision. Throughout, he illuminates the surprising intricacies of the natural world, and our human attitudes towards those intricacies. A distinguished essayist, Quammen’s reporting is masterful and thought provoking and his curiosity and fascination with the world of living things is infectious.

In this book, Dante, Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott engage in an eloquent and meaningful conversation. Dante's capacity for being faithful to the collective historical experience and true to the recognitions of the emerging self, the permanent immediacy of his poetry, the healthy state of his language, which is so close to the object that the two are identified, and his adamant refusal to get lost in the wide and open sea of abstraction - all these are shown to have affected, and to continue to affect, Heaney's and Walcott's work. The Flight of the Vemacular, however, is not only a record of what Dante means to the two contemporary poets but also a cogent study of Heaney's and Walcott's attitude towards language and of their views on the function of poetry in our time. Heaney's programmatic endeavour to be adept at dialect and Walcott's idiosyncratic redefinition of the vernacular in poetry as tone rather than as dialect - apart from having Dantean overtones - are presented as being associated with the belief that poetry is a social reality and that langauge is a living alphabet bound to the opened ground of the world.

“Compulsively readable—a masterpiece, maybe the masterpiece of science journalism.” —Bill McKibben, Audubon A brilliant, stirring work, breathtaking in its scope and far-reaching in its message, The Song of the Dodo is a crucial book in precarious times. Through personal observation, scientific theory, and history, David Quammen examines the mysteries of evolution and extinction and radically alters our understanding of the natural world and our place within it. In this landmark of science writing, we learn how the isolation of islands makes them natural laboratories of evolutionary extravagance, as seen in the dragons of Komodo, the elephant birds of Madagascar, the giant tortoises of the Galapagos. But the dark message of island studies is that isolated ecosystems, whether natural or human-made, are also hotbeds of extinction. And as the world’s landscapes, from Tasmania to the Amazon to Yellowstone, are carved into pieces by human activity, the implications of this knowledge are more urgent than ever. An unforgettable scientific adventure, a fascinating account of an eight-year journey of discovery, and a wake-up call for our time, David Quammen’s The Song of the Dodo is an exquisitely written book that takes the reader on a globe-circling tour of wild places and extraordinary ideas.

In this New York Times bestseller and longlist nominee for the National Book Award, “our greatest living chronicler of the natural world” (The New York Times), David Quammen explains how recent discoveries in molecular biology affect our understanding of evolution and life’s history. In the mid-1970s, scientists began using DNA sequences to reexamine the history of all life. Perhaps the most startling discovery to come out of this new field—the study of life’s diversity and relatedness at the molecular level—is horizontal gene transfer (HGT), or the movement of genes across species lines. It turns out that HGT has been widespread and important; we now know that roughly eight percent of the human genome arrived sideways by viral infection—a type of HGT. In The Tangled Tree, “the grandest tale in biology….David Quammen presents the science—and the scientists involved—with patience, candor, and flair” (Nature). We learn about the major players, such as Carl Woese, the most important little-known biologist of the twentieth century; Lynn Margulis, the notorious maverick whose wild ideas about “mosaic” creatures proved to be true; and Tsutomu Wantanabe, who discovered that the scourge of antibiotic-resistant bacteria is a direct result of horizontal gene transfer, bringing the deep study of genome histories to bear on a global crisis in public health. “David Quammen proves to be an immensely well-informed guide to a complex story” (The Wall Street Journal). In The Tangled Tree, he explains how molecular studies of evolution have brought startling recognitions about the tangled tree of life—including where we humans fit upon it. Thanks to new technologies, we now have the ability to alter even our genetic composition—through sideways insertions, as nature has long been doing. “The Tangled Tree is a source of wonder….Quammen has written a deep and daring intellectual adventure” (The Boston Globe).

From “one of the most fascinating and thought-provoking writers of natural history” (The Seattle Times), a collection of enduring essays that form a bestiary of wondrous creatures and a gallery of the human faces that peer at them. The Boilerplate Rhino brings together twenty-six of David Quammen’s most thoughtful and engaging essays from his column for Outside magazine, gifting readers with an irrepressible assortment of ideas to explore, conundrums to contemplate, and wondrous creatures to behold. In lucid, penetrating, and often quirkily idiosyncratic prose, David Quammen takes his readers with him as he explores the world. His travels lead him to rattlesnake handlers in Texas; a lizard specialist in Baja; the dinosaur museum in Jordan, Montana; and halfway across Indonesia in search of the perfect Durian fruit. He ponders the history of nutmeg in the southern Moluccas, meditates on bioluminescent beetles while soaking in the waters of the Amazon, and delivers “The Dope on Eggs” from a chicken ranch near his hometown in Montana. Quammen's travels are always jumping-off points to explore the rich and sometimes horrifying tension between humankind and the natural world, in all its complexity and ambivalence. The result is another irrepressible assortment of ideas to explore, conundrums to contemplate, and wondrous creatures to behold.

"Originally published in 2014 in Great Britain by Short Books."--Title page verso.

"[Strycker] thinks like a biologist but writes like a poet." -- Wall Street Journal An entertaining and profound look at the lives of birds, illuminating their surprising world—and deep connection with humanity. Birds are highly intelligent animals, yet their intelligence is dramatically different from our own and has been little understood. As we learn more about the secrets of bird life, we are unlocking fascinating insights into memory, relationships, game theory, and the nature of intelligence itself. The Thing with Feathers explores the astonishing homing abilities of pigeons, the good deeds of fairy-wrens, the influential flocking abilities of starlings, the deft artistry of bowerbirds, the extraordinary memories of nutcrackers, the lifelong loves of albatrosses, and other mysteries—revealing why birds do what they do, and offering a glimpse into our own nature. Drawing deep from personal experience, cutting-edge science, and colorful history, Noah Strycker spins captivating stories about the birds in our midst and shares the startlingly intimate coexistence of birds and humans. With humor, style, and grace, he shows how our view of the world is often, and remarkably, through the experience of birds. You’ve never read a book about birds like this one.

Successfully navigate the rich world of travel narratives and identify fiction and nonfiction read-alikes with this detailed and expertly constructed guide. Just as savvy travelers make use of guidebooks to help navigate the hundreds of countries around the globe, smart librarians need a guidebook that makes sense of the world of travel narratives. Going Places: A Reader's Guide to Travel Narratives meets that demand, helping librarians assist patrons in finding the nonfiction books that most interest them. It will also serve to help users better understand the genre and their own reading interests. The book examines the subgenres of the travel narrative genre in its seven chapters, categorizing and describing approximately 600 titles according to genres and broad reading interests, and identifying hundreds of other fiction and nonfiction titles as read-alikes and related reads by shared key topics. The author has also identified award-winning titles and spotlighted further resources on travel lit, making this work an ideal guide for readers' advisors as well a book general readers will enjoy browsing.