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The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions
Winner:Helen Bernstein Book Award -Excellence in Journalism (1997)
Winner:John Burroughs Medal for Outstanding Natural History Writing -Natural History (1997)
Thirty years ago, two young biologists named Robert MacArthur and Edward O. Wilson triggered a far-reaching scientific revolution. In a book titled The Theory of Island Biogeography, they presented a new view of a little-understood matter: the geographical patterns in which animal and plant species occur. Why do marsupials exist in Australia and South America, but not in Africa? Why do tigers exist in Asia, but not in New Guinea? Influenced by MacArthur and Wilson's book, an entire generation of ecologists has recognized that island biogeography - the study of the distribution of species on islands and islandlike patches of landscape - yields important insights into the origin and extinction of species everywhere. The new mode of thought focuses particularly on a single question: Why have island ecosystems always suffered such high rates of extinction? In our own age, with all the world's landscapes, from Tasmania to the Amazon to Yellowstone, now being carved into islandlike fragments by human activity, the implications of island biogeography are more urgent than ever. Until now, this scientific revolution has remained unknown to the general public. But over the past eight years, David Quammen has followed its threads on a globe-circling journey of discovery. In Madagascar, he has considered the meaning of tenrecs, a group of strange, prickly mammals native to that island. On the island of Guam, he has confronted a pestilential explosion of snakes and spiders. In these and other places, he has prowled through wild terrain with extraordinary scientists who study unusual beasts. The result is The Song of the Dodo, a book filled with landscape, wonder, and ideas. Besides being a grandoutdoor adventure, it is, above all, a wake-up call to the age of extinctions.
Book Details
- Publisher: Scribner Book Company
- Publish Date: Apr 14th, 1997
- Pages: 704
- Language: English
- Edition: undefined - undefined
- Dimensions: 9.22in - 6.20in - 1.22in - 1.71lb
- EAN: 9780684827124
- Categories: • General• Environmental Science (see also Chemistry - Environmental)• Life Sciences - Biology
About the Author
Quammen, David: - David Quammen's books include Breathless, The Tangled Tree, The Song of the Dodo, The Reluctant Mr. Darwin, and Spillover. He has written for The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, The Atlantic, National Geographic, and Outside, among other magazines, and is a three-time winner of the National Magazine Award. Quammen shares a home in Bozeman, Montana, with his wife, Betsy Gaines Quammen, author of American Zion, and with three Russian wolfhounds, a cross-eyed cat, and a rescue python. Visit him at DavidQuammen.com.
Praise for this book
"Magnificent . . . intelligent, playful . . . an epic adventure of the mind and spirit . . . Here is what a book can be." -The New York Times Book Review "As close as science writing gets to a thrilling adventure yarn." -Newsweek "Stunning." -Barry Lopez, author of Arctic Dreams