The Great Chain of Life - Softcover

Joseph Wood Krutch

3.96

27 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0395259436 ISBN 13: 9780395259436

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1978

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Explores evolutionary processes and aspects of animal behavior and natural history, drawing upon the biological sciences and firsthand observations

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About the Author:

Joseph Wood Krutch (1893–1970) was the Brander Matthews Chair of Dramatic Literature at Columbia University for two decades and served as the Nation’s drama critic for nearly thirty years. A Burroughs Medal laureate, Krutch published more than a dozen books. Paul Landacre was a Los Angeles artist, a member of the National Academy of Design, and teacher at the University of Southern California, the Otis Art Institute, and the Kahl Institute.

Review:

“Krutch begins with protozoa and ends with the human—and the sense of a cardinal outside his window, finding in the latter the suggestion that perhaps joy, not the struggle for survival alone, is the essence of life, both its origin and its quest. . . . In his unwavering insistence, to the very end of his life, on the primacy of freedom, purpose, will, play and joy, and in the kinship of the human with all forms of life, he defended those values which form, I believe, the meaning of mankind's history as well as that aspiration toward civilization which is history's only �lan vital.”—Edward Abbey

“An endearing voice on the subject of natural history and environmental conservation. Joseph Wood Krutch's firsthand observations of nature, mixed with insightful musings based on what man knew of the world by the 1950s, make for fascinating and enlightening reading.”—James Prosek, author, Trout: An Illustrated History and The Day My Mother Left

“A wise and well-informed humanist has taken the time to look lovingly and wonderingly at the living world around him and to study the ways in which scientists have tried to analyze the world. . . . The best introduction to natural history that has yet been written.”—Marston Bates, New York Times

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