The Flight of the Iguana: A Sidelong View of Science and Nature - Softcover

Quammen, David

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0684836262 ISBN 13: 9780684836263

Publisher: Scribner, 1998

Synopsis

From the award-winning author of The Song of the Dodo comes a collection of essays in which various weird and wonderful aspects of nature are examined. From tales of vegetarian piranha fish and voiceless dogs to the scientific search for the genes that threaten to destroy the cheetah, Quammen captures the natural world with precision. A distinguished natural science essayist, Quammen’s reporting is masterful and thought provoking and his curiosity and fascination with the world of living things is infectious.

About this title

About the Author

David Quammen’s fifteen books include The Tangled Tree, The Song of the Dodo, The Reluctant Mr. Darwin, and Spillover, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award. He has written for Harper’s, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, The New York Times Book Review, Outside, and Powder, among other magazines, and is a contributing writer for National Geographic. He wrote the entire text of the May 2016 issue of National Geographic on the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem—the first time in the history of the magazine that an issue was single-authored. Quammen shares a home in Bozeman, Montana, with his wife, Betsy Gaines Quammen, an environmental historian, along with two Russian wolfhounds and a cross-eyed cat. Visit him at DavidQuammen.com. 

From Publishers Weekly

Quammen's columns in Outdoor Magazine are famed as an entertaining source of offbeat information. In this collection, he casts sidelong glances at creationism and extinction, at giant earthworms and Canada geese. But he takes a direct view at the plight of Salvadoran refugees and at the Sanctuary Movement; he accompanied one group on a dramatic journey across the Sonoran desert. Quammen examines the special problems of species survival on islands (and tells us what is happening to the birds of Guam); he discusses the unusually small gene pool of cheetahs and how the Papago Indians survive in desert lands. There is a piece about visiting the Okefenokee Swamp, while the title essay is set in the Galapagos. Readers who enjoyed Natural Acts will find Quammen's new collection equally interesting.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0684836262
• ISBN 13: 9780684836263
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 320