“Malthus? Really? How is he in any way related to natural history?”
Cast your mind back to Darwin’s “Origin.” What were the two books known to have been among the – if not indeed the – most significant influences on Darwin’s thoughts when writing it? Sir Charles Lyell’s “Principles of Geology” and Thomas Malthus’ “An Essay on the Principle of Population.”
The first books of natural history I can recall reading were David Quammen’s “Natural Acts” and Bernd Heinrich’s “Ravens in Winter.” While I know I had read others before, these two stick in my mind due to the power each of them had to demand that I look more deeply at the world around me and ask not just “what” but “why?”
In her cover-featured essay “The Origin of the Thesis” in the 14 December 2017 issue of the Times Literary Supplement, Clare Pettitt presents her thoughts about four recent books that take Charles Darwin as their respective subjects.
It only took me a few pages of reading in Leslie T. Sharpe’s “The Quarry Fox And Other Critters of the Wild Catskills,” recently published by The Overlook Press, to find myself wondering if I wasn’t in fact reading a long-lost essay by sage of the Catskills himself, John Burroughs.