Natural Acts: A Sidelong View of Science and Nature {original edition}
by David Quammen
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A collection of his popular essays from Outside magazine, here Quammen writes about dinosaurs, crows, octopi, beetles, and human beings with an eye for the irony and humor in nature. "A delightful blend of skepticism, intelligence, and accurate reporting". -- Barry LopezTags
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Member Reviews
This collection is hard to find, but it's a great one. Quammen's essays are phenomenal. He's the working man's biology writer. You don't have to have a degree to know what he's talking about, and I think that's because he took an English degree rather than biology. So he's just a great writer whose love of nature shines through in his essays.
If you'd rather have your "news of the weird" buried under a pile of forced and mixed metaphors, this is your guy. Just awful writing, the painful attempts to include literary references make it worse still.
an inordinate fondness for beetles an attribute of deity? mosquito as guardian of tropical forests, crows too intelligent
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33+ Works 8,460 Members
Writer David Quammen grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio and was later educated at both Yale and Oxford Universities. Quammen began his career by writing for The Christian Science Monitor, the National Center for Appropriate Technology, and Audubon, Esquire, Rolling Stone, and Harpers Magazines. He wrote the novels The Soul of Viktor Tronko and The Song show more of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions, which won the 1997 New York Public Library Helen Bernstein Award for Excellence in Journalism. He also received two National Magazine Awards for his column "Natural Acts" in Outside magazine. (Bowker Author Biography) David Quammen is the author of "The Boilerplate Rhino" & "The Song of the Dodo." Among his honors are two National Magazine Awards for his writing in "Outside." (Bowker Author Biography) David Quammen is a two-time winner of the National Magazine Award for his science essays & other work in "Outside" magazine. He is the author of three novels & several other books, including the award-winning "The Song of the Dodo". He lives in Bozeman, Montana. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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- Canonical title
- Natural Acts: A Sidelong View of Science and Nature {original edition}
- Original publication date
- 1985
- Original language
- English
- Disambiguation notice
- Please distinguish between this original David Quammen original essay anthology, Natural Acts: A Sidelong View of Science and Nature (1985), and his revised & expanded anthology of the same title (2008). See conte... (show all)nts listed in the book description CK below.
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- Reviews
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- Rating
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- Languages
- English
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- ISBNs
- 5
- UPCs
- 1
- ASINs
- 5



























































