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Review by Alden Mudge
What an astonishing accomplishment and what a delightful blend of learning and lore is Darwin's Orchestra! But how the heck can any one person know all the history, science, literature, and art assembled so cleverly here? One wishes "Michael Sims" were the nom de plume for some slightly eccentric scholarly enterprise, a small syndicate of researchers and writers, say, bent on educating society by amusing society. But, alas, I am assured that Michael Sims is a living, breathing individual. Life is unfair. Nature distributes her gifts unequally.
And Nature, as represented in the Arts and as recorded in history, is the broad subject of Darwin's Orchestra. Arranged as day-by-day entries following the calendar year, the 366 essays in the book, each little more than a page in length, roam through more than 2,000 years of recorded history. The entries dip into seemingly hundreds of novels, biographies, plays, and movies, glide by dozens of paintings, sculptures and even cartoons, and nod to everyone from Gary Larson and Roman Pliny the Elder (who, you probably knew, was killed by sulfurous fumes from the eruption of Vesuvius -- on August 25, A.D. 79 ) to Georgia O'Keeffe and eleven-year-old Emily Shore (an English girl who began a diary of fascinating natural observations on July 5, 1831 and kept it until she died of tuberculosis eight years later). In short, the book offers a most entertaining journey, packed with obscure facts and arresting anecdotes -- all linked, sometimes by the most whimsical of threads, to Nature and the natural world.
Of course, this is a journey best made in small steps. Darwin's Orchestra is a compendium, after all, a sort of reference book, if an admittedly idiosyncratic one. You'll want to linger here and there while developing your own method for exploration. In my own forced marches among the entries of the even months of the year, I've discovered nothing to point to as "typical." No one entry can stand for all others. Each essay is unique, with a sense, shape, and title all its own ("Dodo in Wonderland," "The Inconvenience of Air," "The Neck of the Giraffe"). But all are bound to their companions by Michael Sims's wit, awesome knowledge, and narrative energy.
A small example of Sims's wit? The clever way in which he marries an essay to its date. Sometimes the relationship is obvious: a biographical essay about the great American conservationist Gifford Pinchot falls on his birthday (August 11); and a short history of the Wolf Man falls on the day the Hollywood movie premiered (December 10 [1941]). But how does the wonderful essay about moonlight come to fall on June 6? Why, because on that date in 1841 Ralph Waldo Emerson "remarked in his journal that he sometimes tired of his house and neighborhood because of their shortcomings. However, when he saw them by moonlight he changed his mind." How the heck does Sims know this stuff?!
But Darwin's Orchestra isn't just a parade ground for Sims's brilliance. In the first place, there is Darwin, who appears in a number of entries and informs those in which he is not actually present. As Sims writes, "You can't look at biology, even at your pet cat or local songbirds, even at imaginative works of art that address the natural world, without seeing them differently because of him and his colleagues."
Then there is the cumulative effect of this book of days. You can't read it without becoming something of an environmentalist. The variety of the natural world and of the human responses to Nature -- poetic, wise, silly, heroic -- is simply amazing. To read Darwin's Orchestra is to discover once again that we really do live in a world of wonders.
©1997, ProMotion, inc.
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