by David Quammen
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Product Description
A revised and expanded edition of Quammen's first book of nonfiction, including the best of his recent work.
"Lively writing about science and nature depends less on the offering of good answers, I think, than on the offering of good questions," said David Quammen in the original introduction to Natural Acts. For more than two decades, he has stuck to that credo. In this updated version of his first essay collection, Quammen's lively curiosity leads him from New Mexico to Romania, from the Congo to the Amazon, asking questions about mosquitoes (what are their redeeming merits?), dinosaurs (how did they change the life of a dyslexic Vietnam vet?), and cloning (can it save endangered species?).
This expanded edition returns to print Quammen's best-loved "Natural Acts" columns, which first appeared in Outside magazine in the early 1980s, and includes recent pieces such as "Planet of Weeds," an influential Harper's cover story. The new Natural Acts is an eye-opening journey that will please both Quammen fans and newcomers to his work.
Amazon.com 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
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Average Customer Review:
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
 Highly Recommended, 2008-07-13
This marvelous collection of essays covers a wide range of topics, including death by hypothermia, giant octopus wrestling, and of course, Tycho Brahe's missing nose. But my personal favorite is Quammen's account of the U.S. Army program to train bats to firebomb Japanese cities during WW II. Needless to say, this endeavor proved disastrous for teachers and pupils alike.
In another piece, Quammen discusses the long-term consequences of overpopulation and habitat loss on our natural inheritance. He begins this essay with a brief discussion of planet Earth's five major extinction events so far, and offers a thoughtful, richly detailed prognosis as we blithely sail toward the sixth.
Anyone with even a passing interest in science would enjoy reading Natural Acts. I highly recommend this book, both for its style and substance.
0 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
 Very bad, grating prose; interesting subject matter, 2008-06-24
Just a heads up: though David Quammen has won awards for his prose, it's grating and full of segways. Just a sample, picked randomly from one of his nature essays (Time and Motion Study): "We've all heard the canard (masquerading as scientific fact that someone remembered someone else having read somewhere, always untraceable and unconfirmed) that the flight of a bumblebee is aerodynamically inexplicable". It's like this throughout. Quammen comes across as a pretentious, book-learned auto mechanic.
If you can stomach the prose then the articles are interesting for the few factual titbits. But Quammen is a difficult read because of the ackward prose.
A better writer for non-fiction is John McPhee. A better writer, period, is Ernst Hemingway.
2 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
not painful, 2001-02-22
Science writing is rarely both illuminating and entertaining, and that is why this book is exceptional.
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
Should be 6 Stars.......... Simply Great, 2001-01-11
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.
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
Great, for what it is, 2000-07-07
Quammen's first work in book form is merely a collection of his various magazine articles. You may be slightly annoyed when reading the book in a couple days because some subjects are repeated. But when you realize they appeared 2 or 3 yrs apart in a magazine, its easily excusable. Especially when the writing is so superb, timely (actually ahead of its time, since much of it was written 20+ years ago), interesting and educational. Some of the more dire environmental predictions havent exactly come true (YET), but that does not diminish the urgency of our ecological nightmare.Read this book as a primer, then read Quammen's "Song of the Dodo," to gain some true knowledge.
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