The Boilerplate Rhino

In 1981 David Quammen began what might be every freelance writer's dream: a monthly column for Outside magazine in which he was given free rein to write about anything that interested him in the natural world. His column was called "Natural Acts," and for the next fifteen years he delighted Outside's readers with his fascinating ruminations on the world around us. The Boilerplate Rhino brings together twenty-six of Quammen's most thoughtful and engaging essays from that column, none previously printed in any of his earlier books. In lucid, penetrating, and often quirkily idiosyncratic prose, David Quammen takes his readers with him as he explores the world. His travels lead him to rattlesnake handlers in Texas; a lizard specialist in Baja; the dinosaur museum in Jordan, Montana; and halfway across Indonesia in search of the perfect Durian fruit. He ponders the history of nutmeg in the southern Moluccas, meditates on bioluminescent beetles while soaking in the waters of the Amazon, and delivers "The Dope on Eggs" from a chicken ranch near his hometown in Montana. Quammen's travels are always jumping-off points to explore the rich and sometimes horrifying tension between humankind and the natural world, in all its complexity and ambivalence. The result is another irrepressible assortment of ideas to explore, conundrums to contemplate, and wondrous creatures to behold.

The rhinoceros’s horn and massive leathery frame belie its docile and solitary nature, causing the animal to be consistently perceived by humans as a monster to be feared. Kelly Enright now deftly sifts fact from fiction in Rhinoceros. Enright chronicles the vexed interactions between humans and rhinos, from early sightings that mistook the rhinoceros for the mythical unicorn to the eighteenth-century display of the rhinoceros in Europe as a wonder of nature and its introduction to the American public in 1830. The rhinoceros has long been a prized hunting object as well, whether for its horn as a valuable ingredient in Asian medicine or as a coveted trophy by nineteenth-century big-game hunters such as Theodore Roosevelt, and the book explains how such practices have led to the rhino’s status as an endangered species. Enright also considers portrayals of the animal in film, literature, and art, all in the service of discovering whether the reputed savagery of the rhino is a reality or a legacy of its mythic past. A wide-ranging, highly illustrated study, Rhinoceros will be essential for scholars and animal lovers alike.

Writing Environments addresses the intersections between writing and nature through interviews with some of America's leading environmental writers. Those interviewed include Rick Bass, Cheryll Glotfelty, Annette Kolodny, Max Oelschlaeger, Simon J. Ortiz, David Quammen, Janisse Ray, Scott Russell Sanders, Edward O. Wilson, and Ann H. Zwinger. From the standpoints of activists, scientists, naturalists, teachers, and highly visible writers, the interviewees consider how different environments have influenced them, how their writing affects environments, and the ways readers experience environments. The interviews are followed by critical responses from writing scholars. This diverse range of voices speaks lucidly and captivatingly about topics such as place, writing, teaching, politics, race, and culture, and how these overlap in many complex ways.

In Wild Thoughts from Wild Places, award-winning journalist David Quammen reminds us why he has become one of our most beloved science and nature writers. This collection of twenty-three of Quammen's most intriguing, most exciting, most memorable pieces takes us to meet kayakers on the Futaleufu River of southern Chile, where Quammen describes how it feels to travel in fast company and flail for survival in the river's maw. We are introduced to the commerce in pearls (and black-market parrots) in the Aru Islands of eastern Indonesia. Quammen even finds wildness in smog-choked Los Angeles -- embodied in an elusive population of urban coyotes, too stubborn and too clever to surrender to the sprawl of civilization. With humor and intelligence, David Quammen's Wild Thoughts from Wild Places also reminds us that humans are just one of the many species on earth with motivations, goals, quirks, and eccentricities. Expect to be entertained and moved on this journey through the wilds of science and nature.

"[Mr. Quammen] is not just among our best science writers but among our best writers, period." —Dwight Garner, New York Times The next big human pandemic—the next disease cataclysm, perhaps on the scale of AIDS or the 1918 influenza—is likely to be caused by a new virus coming to humans from wildlife. Experts call such an event “spillover” and they warn us to brace ourselves. David Quammen has tracked this subject from the jungles of Central Africa, the rooftops of Bangladesh, and the caves of southern China to the laboratories where researchers work in space suits to study lethal viruses. He illuminates the dynamics of Ebola, SARS, bird flu, Lyme disease, and other emerging threats and tells the story of AIDS and its origins as it has never before been told. Spillover reads like a mystery tale, full of mayhem and clues and questions. When the Next Big One arrives, what will it look like? From which innocent host animal will it emerge? Will we be ready?

Beginning with Yuka, a 39,000-year-old mummified woolly mammoth recently found in the Siberian permafrost, each of the sixteen essays in Animals Strike Curious Poses investigates a different famous animal named and immortalized by humans. Modeled loosely after a medieval bestiary, these witty, playful, whipsmart essays traverse history, myth, science, and more, bringing each beast vibrantly to life. Elena Passarello is an actor, a writer, and recipient of a 2015 Whiting Fellowship in nonfiction. Her first collection with Sarabande Books, Let Me Clear My Throat, won the gold medal for nonfiction at the 2013 Independent Publisher Awards. She lives in Corvallis, Oregon.

"Quammen brilliantly and powerfully re-creates the 19th century naturalist's intellectual and spiritual journey."--Los Angeles Times Book Review Twenty-one years passed between Charles Darwin's epiphany that "natural selection" formed the basis of evolution and the scientist's publication of On the Origin of Species. Why did Darwin delay, and what happened during the course of those two decades? The human drama and scientific basis of these years constitute a fascinating, tangled tale that elucidates the character of a cautious naturalist who initiated an intellectual revolution.

"David Quammen is simply the best natural essayist working today."--Tim Cahill, author of Lost in My Own Backyard "Lively writing about science and nature depends less on the offering of good answers, I think, than on the offering of good questions," said David Quammen in the original introduction to Natural Acts. For more than two decades, he has stuck to that credo. In this updated version of curiosity leads him from New Mexico to Romania, from the Congo to the Amazon, asking questions about mosquitoes (what are their redeeming merits?), dinosaurs (how did they change the life of a dyslexic Vietnam vet?), and cloning (can it save endangered species?). This revised and expanded edition best-loved "Natural Acts" columns, which first appeared in Outside magazine in the early 1980s, and includes recent pieces such as "Planet of Weeds," an influential new Natural Acts is an eye-opening journey that will please both Quammen fans and newcomers to his work. Song lyrics have been redacted from this ebook owing to permissions issues.