Wallace

When God Was a Bird

September 23, 2020

Published in 2019 by Fordham University Press, this book caught my attention for it’s remarkably daring central proposition, that “[r]eligion in general, and Christianity in particular, appears to bear a disproportionate burden for creating humankind’s exploitative attitudes toward nature through unearthly theologies that divorce human beings and their spiritual yearnings from their natural origins. […] And yet, buried deep within the Christian tradition are startling portrayals of God as the beaked and feathered Holy Spirit – the ‘animal God,’ as it were, of historic Christian witness.”

Books for Every Naturalist

February 19, 2017

As promised to a reader who inquired as to what books I would recommend to any naturalist, regardless of where on the planet they may live or study, I offer the following list of books that I consider as highly beneficial to anyone seeking to deepen their understanding of natural history. The list is, of […]

Naturalists in Paradise

September 10, 2015

Three naturalists walk into the world’s largest tropical rainforest… No, it’s not the set-up for what could indeed be a pretty good natural science joke (with a punchline that includes the phrase “Good thing Spruce brought the tonic water!”); rather it’s the beginnings of a series of adventures that would yield some of the most significant scientific discoveries of the nineteenth century.

The Annotated Malay Archipelago

April 30, 2015

Edited by John van Whye, this first-of-its-kind edition of Wallace’s famous work promises not only to make Wallace’s ideas and discoveries more accessible to modern readers, it also seeks to put his work as a whole in much richer context by placing Wallace and his writings squarely in their time.