The Species Seekers: Heroes, Fools, and the Mad Pursuit of Life on Earth

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The Species Seekers: Heroes, Fools, and the Mad Pursuit of Life on Earth

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Overview

"This beautifully written book has the verve of an adventure story." —Wall Street Journal

From the mid-eighteenth century to the early twentieth, a colorful band of amateur naturalists explored the most perilous corners of the planet to discover new life-forms. Amid globe-spanning tales of adventure, Richard Conniff recounts a dramatic historical shift, as humans finally discovered the pantheon of life on Earth-and our place within it.

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Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393341324
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	11/07/2011
Pages:	480
Product dimensions:	8.26(w) x 5.54(h) x 1.13(d)

About the Author

Richard Conniff, a Guggenheim Fellow and winner of the National Magazine Award, writes for Smithsonian and National Geographic and is a frequent commentator on NPR's All Things Considered and a guest columnist for the New York Times. His books include The Natural History of the Rich, Swimming with Piranhas at Feeding Time, and The Species Seekers. He lives in Old Lyme, Connecticut.

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Editorial Reviews

"An anecdotal romp through the strange history of naturalism. Absurd characters, exciting discoveries, and fierce rivalries abound."— Outside Magazine

"An enduring story bursting at the seams with intriguing, fantastical and disturbing anecdotes."— New Scientist

"[Conniff] chronicles two centuries of adventure, and at the same time illustrates important developments in human thought."— Christian Science Monitor

"A swashbuckling romp…brilliantly evokes that just-before Darwin era."— BBC Focus

"[This] history of the ‘great age of discovery’ is spellbinding."— Publishers Weekly

"[Conniff’s] enthusiasm for his subject and admiration of these explorers is infectious…an entertaining survey."— Kirkus Reviews

"Modern biology and medicine would not be what they are today if not for the death-defying naturalists who set out to travel the world and find new species. In The Species Seekers, Richard Conniff creates a marvelous rogues’ gallery of these brave, sometimes reckless heroes of taxonomy, full of surprising tales of gorillas, platypuses, and disease-laden mosquitoes."— Carl Zimmer, author of Parasite Rex

"A marvelous tribute to the age of wonder."— Bernd Heinrich, author of White Feathers and Racing the Clock

From the Publisher

Nature writer Conniff (Swimming with Piranhas at Feeding Time: My Life Doing Dumb Stuff with Animals, 2009, etc.) chronicles the obsessions and joys of naturalists who, in the 18th and 19th centuries, fanned out across the globe in pursuit of new species.
"For that sense of private joy in small moments of discovery," writes the author, these adventurers and scientists willingly braved "hunger, loneliness, disease and other hardships of field life." Collectively, their discoveries contributed a body of knowledge that laid the ground for Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859). A century earlier, Carolus Linnaeus' classification scheme helped systematize the new knowledge, although the discovery of strange fossils challenged his belief in the Bible (e.g., five-pound teeth of extinct mammoths found in the American colonies). George Washington's private collection included one, and Thomas Jefferson referenced them to refute claims that New World species were stunted because the supposedly inhospitable climate. Darwin's evolutionary theory of natural selection challenged contemporary notions of man's special relationship to God and suggested the alarming notion that humans had evolved from an orangutan. When Linnaeus published the 1758 edition ofSystema Naturae, he listed 4,400 species; at the end of the 19th century, 415,600 were known. "But even today," writes Conniff, "with the total of known species pushing 2 million, new species continue to turn up almost everywhere in the modern world." The author considers these continued discoveries to be "a broad triumph of the human mind," and his enthusiasm for his subject and admiration of these explorers is infectious.
An entertaining survey of a well-worked field that should go nicely alongside the raft of books published for the 2009 Darwin bicentennial.

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