When I find myself in times of trouble
And Mother Mary is ignoring me,
I go seeking words of wisdom
In an anthology.
Birds; An Anthology
Newly Noted Books
New and forthcoming books that are worthy of attention but that have not been fully reviewed.
The Still-Burning Bush
Not so very long ago, while listening to a fascinating podcast discussion about Neanderthals between Melvyn Bragg, Simon Conway Morris, Chris Stringer, and Danielle Schreve from the BBC’s In Our Time program’s archive, I was struck by the use of the phrase “the domestication of fire” by one of the panelists (my apologies for not recalling which one). I hadn’t previously thought about fire as something to be domesticated, but immediately upon hearing the phrase, I thought “well there it is.”
Behind the Crimson Curtain
I’m relatively confident that the fact that whenever I see an image of Charles Wilson Peale pulling back a luxurious crimson curtain in his famous self portrait “The Artist in His Museum” and immediately recall the character Riff Raff, expertly portrayed by Richard O’Brien, opening an upright coffin in the The Rocky Horror Picture Show says absolutely nothing good about me whatsoever.
The Polymath
The seventeenth century Jesuit priest Athanasius Kircher has been called “the last man who knew everything.” From his studies in geology and biology, to his investigations of the language and religious practices of the ancient Egyptians, to his many experiments with mechanical instruments, he was truly an example of those remarkable people we call polymaths. Not surprisingly, given the broad expanse of its areas of potential study, many other prominent figures in the histories of natural philosophy and natural history are similarly worthy of the designation: Hans Sloane, Alexander von Humboldt, Charles Darwin, and John Herschel, to name only a few.