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Review by Michael Sims
David Quammen began his career as a writer of fiction. His novels include "The Soul of Viktor Tronko" and "The Zolta Configuration," both of which earned adjectives that most thrillers don't attract, such as intelligent and literate. Over the years Quammen has also established himself as a commentator on nature. In 1996, he published a certifiable magnum opus, the almost 700-page "The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions," praised by everyone from Edward O. Wilson to Barry Lopez.
However, Quammen is best known as a natural history essayist. For 15 years, from 1981 to 1996, he wrote a column for "Outside" magazine entitled "Natural Acts." Along the way he has managed to write for everything from "Harper's" to "Rolling Stone." His perspective is a quirky, iconoclastic take on, loosely, our views about and interactions with nature, from the contradictions of the wilderness experience to the role of earthworms in ecological stability.
His best essays are gathered into three excellent collections, "Natural Acts," "The Flight of the Iguana," and now "Wild Thoughts from Wild Places." Consisting primarily of later columns from "Outside," the new volume also includes scattered essays from elsewhere. In it Quammen ranges from his early adventures as a fishing guide to the evolution of that great urban success story, the pigeon. He remembers the white tigers in the Cincinnati Zoo of his youth and follows the coyotes that swagger through Los Angeles. He goes whitewater kayaking, ski-races, and eats mountain lion.
Quammen sustains our interest from essay to essay because his own interests are so diverse. The harrowing story of epidemiologists tracking emerging viruses such as Ebola and Lassa seems hardly to come from the same pen as the meditative appreciation of England's immortal parson naturalist, Gilbert White.
One question confronts a reviewer: Should Quammen's short pieces be called "essays" or "articles"? The former term implies a literate informality, the latter an emphasis on fact over opinion. But that's a characteristic of Quammen's hybrid style. It's fact-filled, informative, enlightening, but always in his own voice. His personality and point of view shape the presentation and make it deeper than any dry recitation of facts.
Michael Sims writes often about nature and science.
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