From ancient Greece to the close of the second millennium, the perceptions of the keen scientific eye have been translated over and over into graceful and meaningful texts for the common reader. By the Light of the Glow-Worm Lamp represents the best of the nature-writing genre in over three dozen works from the past three centuries.Alberto Manguel, a great reader and literary connoisseur, serves here as our guide. First outlining a "literary" history of nature writing, he organizes this anthology into four sections: Landscape, Birds, Beasts, and Insects and Fish. He includes authors who did not train as scientists (D.H. Lawrence and Vladimir Nabokov). There are zoologists (John James Audubon), conservationists (Rachael Carson), the great classic figures (Charles Darwin and J. H. Fabre), and well-known contemporary writers (Diane Ackerman, Annie Dillard, and Barry Lopez). A cornucopia of the marvelous and the earthbound, By the Light of the Glow-Worm Lamp will take its place alongside the more popular prose anthologies of our time.
Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Kirkus Reviews
paper 0-306-45992-2 Manguel's (A History of Reading, 1996, etc.) collection of natural history essays is overburdened with selections from Victorian Englishmen, with a smattering of odd gems to sustain the reader's interest. Late 19th- and early 20th-century English writings on nature are known for their high coloration and elegiac tone, where nothing is left unsaid and the din of words can obscure the subject. That style evidently appeals to this editor. The anthologydivided into sections on landscape, birds, beasts, and on insects and fishbuzzes with the work of John Clare and Philip Henry Gosse, Richard Jeffries, Henry Seebohm, and Charles Darwin. Edmund Selouss tone is typical: ``If life is, as some hold it to be, a vast melancholy ocean over which ships more or less sorrow-laden continually pass and ply. . . .'' begins his essay on bird watching. If you push these gents to the side, though, a number of pleasures bob to the surface. They include Annie Dillard's meadow nightwatch (``I must have seen a thousand grasshoppers, alarums and excursions clicking over the clover, knee-high to me'') and Maurice Maeterlinck's wonderfully stuffy tribute to the pismire. We also overhear Vladimir Nabokov deciding whether or not it will be a good day for glimpsing butterflies. Then there are the 18th-century contrarian tweakings of Bedfordshire vicar Charles Abbot, for whom autumn ``is the one favorable time to realize how grand a color is a bright green.'' Mark Twain and D.H. Lawrence offer terrific, if not exactly unknown, landscape notes. Diane Ackerman elegantly reminds readers to get out and observe while the observing is still to be had. With a few fine exceptions, then, heres the nature essay at its most quaint and rhapsodic, from empurpled pens. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
Customer Reviews
|
There are no customer reviews yet.
|
|||
|
Video reviews
|
Tag this product(What's this?)Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organize and find favorite items. |
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
