If a friend were to ask you to recommend a modern book – just one – that would help him or her to understand your fascination with natural history, you’d likely be hard pressed to do it. I know I certainly would. After all, there are so many excellent works that have been published within this wide-ranging category over the past fifty years that picking just one would be quite a challenge indeed. However with the publication of the new Library of America volume of the writings of E.O. Wilson, providing your friend an answer referencing just one book has now become a bit easier.
Gathering together Prof. Wilson‘s brilliant and ground-breaking Biophilia, his expansive The Diversity of Life, and his extraordinary memoir Naturalist into a well-bound hardcover edition, and including an introduction to Prof. Wilson’s life and works by David Quammen (because really, who else would you chose to write the introduction to such a book?) this new addition to the still expanding Library of America series (his is volume #340) presents not only the “essential Wilson,” if you will, but also a superb introduction to some of the most significant discoveries and concepts in modern natural history – all presented in Prof. Wilson’s delightfully learned yet invitingly down-to-earth prose.
As one who has previously read all three of the works included in this new book, I have no hesitation in recommending that you waste no time in securing a copy for yourself, perhaps a few more as gifts for particularly well-liked friends, and perhaps another one or two to keep on hand to loan out to curious friends asking after a single book that would help explain your interest in… well, you get the idea.
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