The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions

I read this book years ago and loved it - it set me on the path of reading much more by David Quammen, and much more non-fiction in general. As the years have passed and I've become fuzzier on the details, I decided to reread it. My first thought, is that I am glad I read this when I was working on my dissertation and clearly had greater...patience...for the scientific aspects of the work. Which should not be taken to mean that it's entirely dry or dull - far from it. It is the case that there's more discourse around competing theories than I remembered and more hard science, but there are plenty of Quammen's own adventures, and all of it - from the hard science to the unlikely encounters - is rendered beautifully.

Interspersed with the hypotheses and journal article excerpts are the anecdotes of Quammen's own travels, the  hilariously self-deprecating stories that led me to declare a decade ago that I wanted to *be* David Quammen when I grew up. As I read about him being mugged in Rio, for example, I could not help but think, "I should not be laughing this hard," and yet also recognize he's selected his words to have just that affect upon the reader. Obviously any author who writes of his half-hearted attempts to ensure he doesn't run into one of the world's deadliest serpents in Tasmania: "I place [my feet] as carefully, anyway, as a person can who's foolish enough to be hiking through the outback at night in cheap running shoes while wearing a headlamp that isn't turned on" is strongly suggesting the reader shouldn't take him too seriously.

While the pendulum swings between hilarity and sobriety, Quammen is always deadly serious, and quietly poignant. It could hardly be otherwise when the recurrent themes are "insular evolution, for all its wondrousness, tends to be a one-way tunnel toward doom," or more succinctly, "islands are where species go to die." I was reminded more than once of Hariri's Sapiens, though Quammen was ahead of the game on the measure by which Homo sapiens were afflicting their damage on the planet by some twenty years. Quammen writes "what it has done here in Guam is precisely what Homo sapiens has done all over the planet: succeeded extravagantly at the expense of other species;" this sentiment is virtually the hypothesis around which Sapiens is written! (It's in the final pages where the parallels are most striking, though, particularly the observation that "the richness of the Earth's ecosystems might recover to previous levels within, oh, ten or twenty million years, assuming that Homo sapiens itself has meanwhile gone extinct too.") So there's the rub: to save the planet, we must eliminate ourselves. 

More than the thoughts Quammen provokes, his prose remains the crown jewel of the book. Whether in the form of a quick turn-of-phrase tucked into a longer sentence (such as the description of something as a "gloriously improbably gambit"), or writing about a scientist who continues to believe that an animal is not quite extinct, despite what Quammen terms empirical discouragement ("that's what faith is: belief that transcends data," a beautifully concise observation with applicability far beyond luckless conservation officers), Quammen's writing remains among the best I have encountered. Questioning the accuracy of one's recollection, Quammen writes "There's surely some little human detail, incidental, piercingly vivid, so poignant that even memory chooses not to remember it." That line stopped me: what in my life had fallen into that category? What tiny details had I subconsciously judged so poignant that even memory chose not to remember? 

But when the topic is the very survival of so many species - when the outcome, should we continue on the current trajectory can be only that "the world will be an emptier, lonelier place," - how can Song of the Dodo be imbued with anything other than poignancy and reflection? Whatever urgency Quammen felt as he researched and wrote this book in the 90s, that urgency is only greater today. For that reason, I find it a shame that Dodo has the heft of a doorstop: more people need to read these words, to consider what it means that "there are no hopeless cases, only people without hope and expensive cases," to weigh the value of flora and fauna against those of unrelenting development.

The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life

It pains me to write this. For years, I've rather idolized David Quammen. From Monster of God to the all-too-relevant Spillover, I've relished Quammen's words and writing. For that reason, I was only too glad to grab The Tangled Tree from the library shelves the afternoon before it closed for the duration. Quammen's latest book focuses on discoveries in the field of molecular biology.

As usual, the writing is beautiful. Unfortunately, I couldn't read more than 150 pages on horizontal gene transfer, the cell walls of archaea, cytoplasm, and the like. Unlike Quammen's previous books, which connect scientific thought with real world implications - species management, for example, or the possibility of a global pandemic (hint: 100%; see: covid-19, 2020) - The Tangled Tree is science for scientists. It is the detailed history of molecular biology from the days of Darwin to present. I wanted to like it. I would have settled for reading it. In the end, much as I hate to admit it, I could do neither.

Die hard science fans only please; the casual reader need not apply.

Monster of God: The Man-Eating Predator in the Jungles of History and the Mind

I have said before that I aspire to be David Quammen when I grow up. Despite the fact that Monster of God was not my favorite Quammen book, I still feel that way. As ever, Quammen combines world travels, science, and an unabashed loved for the English language . His language is rich - ovoid, sessile, extirpated, such terms pepper his chapters and enrich his readers. So, too, does his ability to mine centuries of thought and literature for relevant themes, incorporating Beowulf into a section on Romanian bears and passages from the Bible as he discourses on the lions.

Monster of God sees Quammen travel the globe looking for human-nature interactions between homo sapiens and the largest remaining top-of-the-food-chain predators on earth. Those range from the salt water crocodiles of northern Australia to the lions of India and the Amur tigers of the Russian far east. In each stop, Quammen takes the time to understand the history, the biology, the cultural imperatives, and the end game. Here's a hint, the end game doesn't look good, certainly not for these Alpha animals, and not particularly for the homo sapiens, either. His approach is thoughtful and thorough, and he leaves his readers with more questions than answers, always a hallmark of good writing, IMO. (In this sense I was reminded of the eminently fascinating, but equally depressing Chesapeake Requiem.)

At times, Monster of God hues wordy. I didn't go back and check the number of pages compared to other works (Song of the Dodo, Spillover, Boilerplate Rhino), but it felt longer to me. That said, anyone who appreciates really good writing should appreciate this work -- all the more so if travel or science feature among the reader's passions.

Four stars.

A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail

Bill Bryson wrote A Walk in the Woods over 15 years ago, but I learned of it for the first time this past weekend as I was scanning the library's collection of currently available ebooks. I have read his books before (Lost Continent, most notably) and find them to be humorous and quick to read. I wasn't disappointed. At times, A Walk in the Woods is laugh-out-loud funny.

The deal is this: Bill has decided to hike the Appalachian Trail. He would prefer not to do this alone, though, so he invites basically all of his friends and acquaintances to join him. The one person who takes him up on the offer is an old high school buddy, Stephen Katz, whom Bill has not seen in roughly 20 years. Katz, as Bryson describes him, is recovering from his stint "as Iowa's drug culture," and is seriously out of shape and overweight to boot. He must gorge himself on donuts (or Snickers, or something else of that nature) regularly to avoid the seizures that have plagued him since his run-in with a bad batch of narcotics a decade earlier.

So it is that this unlikely duo sets out for the southernmost end of the trail, deep in Georgia, and begins hiking. Their adventures, or more specifically those they encounter over the course of their adventures, make for fantastic reading. From nutty hikers to those who pick up hitchhikers to innkeepers and cab drivers, Bryson brings color - and humor - to each day's long, hard slog.

In addition to chronicling his very long walk in the woods, Bryson offers a great deal of history on the Appalachian Trail, the National Parks Service and Forest Service pretty generally, and even the dreaded zoonotic diseases one might encounter within the parks. For a moment I forgot I was reading Bryson and thought I was reading Quammen.

Four stars.

Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

I know what I want to be when I grow up. David Quammen. Okay, fine, you heard me moon over his The Boilerplate Rhino earlier this summer, but really, each time I read one of his books I appreciate what he does all the more...and can only wish that I might be a globe-trotting, tome-writing, scientist-cum-author. So, what's the story with Spillover?

In his latest book, Quammen has set out to understand the origins of any number of zoonoses (diseases that transfer from animals to people). He provides a detailed examination of some of the better known ones - such as AIDS, ebola, and yellow fever - as well as ones most readers have probably never heard of: Nipah, anyone? Hendra? Marburg virus? Typhoid Mary makes an appearance, as does Henrietta Lacks (a great, great read, but before I started the blog). To cover such ground, literally and figuratively, Quammen criss-crosses the planet, from Bangladesh and the Congo to Washington, DC, and the Outback, speaking with molecular biologists, immunologists, epidemiologists and the like, rendering their science-speak into understandable, and highly readable, prose.

The opening pages provide an entirely-too-vivid description of Hendra, a virus that spills from bats to horses to humans with terrible consequences for equines and people alike. I skimmed them, to be honest, and fervently prayed that such imagery would not be a regular occurrence. It wasn't, although many of the descriptions did give me flashbacks to my days working for the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, when I first became aware of the myriad, bizarre ways a person might suffer and, not rarely, die.

This is a long book, over 500 pages, broken into nine sections each containing roughly a dozen mini-chapters. Occasionally, by necessity, the language gets a bit technical (which Quammen acknowledges readily, cheekily adding that if his reader has followed, say, the evolutionary stages of a virus, that reader has a promising future in biology). Still, the writing is engaging and the adventures are certainly never dull (searching out primate dung in the far reaches of Africa and capturing bats - flying foxes, specifically - in Southeast Asia, for example, to say nothing of the logistics that are often involved...on second thought, I want to be David Quammen, but with flush toilets and room service).

My only real complaint is that the last 30 or so pages seem to drag in comparison to the rest of the book. The hypothetical story of the Cut Hunter and Voyager, for example, are completely superfluous given the painstaking work in the preceding hundreds of pages. All the same, though, for anyone with an interest in science, off-the-beaten-path travel, and good writing, you won't find a better book this year. Just be sure to skim (or skip) those first few bloody pages.

The Boilerplate Rhino: Nature in the Eye of the Beholder

I have spent the last several weeks in Japan leading a group of undergraduates on a study abroad program. It's been an amazing experience and great for both personal and professional development. It's been less great for reading (and blogging). I did manage a couple of books, though, the first of which is The Boilerplate Rhino. I have my dear friend Clio to thank for introducing me to the world of David Quammen a few years ago. (She was also responsible, in college, for introducing me to my husband, so she's clearly a great lady to know!)

David Quammen is a nature writer. Sometimes the thinks he writes about are fascinating and sometimes they are, excuse, less exciting than watching grass grow. Boilerplate Rhino, which is a collection of essays written for his monthly during his time at Outside magazine, has some of each. His account of the perfect durian fruit is fascinating, for example, as is his essay on the original boilerplate rhino. On the other hand, if I'm being perfectly honest (always my goal), I didn't even manage to read time-and-motion study in its entirety (and these are not especially long essays). From bat watching on Guam to speculating on the owl's absence of a penis (all owls, not a particular owl) to luminescent beetles the size of a human finger the essays run in terms of topics.

Even when the subject seems less than entirely interesting, though, Quammen can always be counted on for his beautiful prose. He describes military jets as "smearing the sky with carbon" during take-off and notes succinctly in an essay about Henry Thoreau that "the human reality is always more complicated than anything that can be put down on paper." Quammen is a writer's writer, a man whose every word seems to be carefully considered before appearing in print. I have loved each book of his I have read (The Song of the Dodo and Wild Thoughts from Wild Places, in addition to Boilerplate Rhino) and am looking forward to my next Quammen pick, just as soon as I read the other 20-odd books on my list.

4 stars.