Customer Reviews

Where Worlds Collide: The Wallace Line (Comstock Books)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

According to S. J. Gould Wallace came second and Darwin came first. For those of us who have studied Wallace, the above (though qualified) observation represents a misaprehension. Darwin was the pioneer of the modern theory of evolution and Wallace was an equivalent pioneer of biogeography.

This book is a treat. It is that rare amalgamation of biography, the geologic history of the Malay archipelago and an account of the geology and biodiversity of the Malay archipelago with maximal interest to any biologist or anyone who has the slightest interest in the wildlife of Austro-Asia.

It goes into exquisite detail into the formation of endemic species on island communities and bemoans the lack of botanical exposure in most studies. It also has one or two spectacular maps of ancient SE Asia. More maps and diagrams would have aided the discussion about localities which are usually very obscure to most readers.

This book deserves to be talked about and will certainly benefit the wildlife and our appreciation of Wallace and that region in all facets. Thank you Penny.

This is yet another book that was written to cash in on the name Wallace.
It is a basic, general overview of the fauna, flora and environment of the Indo-Malayan archipelago, relying heavily on quotes from Wallace's classic "The Malay Archipelago".
If you have never read anything better, you may find it interesting.

However, if you already know a little bit about this region, not to mention if you have been there yourself, several outrageous factual errors will hit the eye.
These are most obvious in the Epilogue, where the author enthusiastically describes her very limited "field-experience" in this region, and tries to add her own 2 cents' to the material gathered from books by others.
Reading that chapter, it also becomes obvious that her only first-hand experience in this region was taking a short cruise trip around the Moluccas. She barely stops even at those islands where her ship passed, yet is quick to make far-reaching conclusions.

On page 219:
"On the nearby Kai islands... my heart sank as I saw that coarse grass now dominates the hills that Wallace desribed as inexpressibly beautiful... No-one will know what biological treasures existed there."
Well, had she bothered to take a short boat trip from Tual, the capital of the Kai Islands, to the larger island of Kai Besar, she would have found forest and fauna largely intact. But if one only visits the major town on a smaller isle...

On page 218:
"Seram is perhaps the only place in South-East Asia where you can walk continuously through undisturbed lowland forest..."
For all the qualities of the relatively small island of Seram, there are far greater expanses of rainforest on the great islands of Sumatra, Borneo, etc.

On page 220, she claims:
"In Sarawak, where Wallace 'collected his Orang-utans, no Orang-Utans exist any more."
Oh dear.
The orangutan is probably the single best-documented species in the entire region, and an estimated thousand of them are still found in Sarawak's Lanjak Entimau Wildlife Sanctuary and Batang Ai National Park (which I have visited myself). Being so far off the mark with such a well-known species will leave you wondering how correct the rest of her 'information' is...

Reading all this nonsense, I started looking for references to the qualifications of the author in the book.
I found no reference to any...

Written in laymans terms, "Where Worlds Collide", is easy reading for all the scientific theories that are narratively explained in cronological order. Fascinating and informative, with a easy flow of events that made this book very hard to put down.

This book is rare find for those of us who aren't biologists (or zoologists, entemologists, etc.) but have often run across tantalizing snippets on Alfred Russel Wallace in other books. Granted, its writer, Penny van Oosterzee, is herself not a scientist, or at least makes no claim to be, but is nonetheless a pretty good story-teller - I found her island-by-island summary of the wildife of eastern Indonesia, and the extent to which the islands differ almost fantastically, to be one of the best parts of the book.

Given the extent to which scientists seem to treat differing opinions (or sometimes the same opinion expressed differently) as an excuse for language that in old Charleston would have immediately got them challenged to a duel, it is also pleasant to find out that Wallace and Darwin, now generally regarded as the twin fathers of evolutionary theory, not only got along well but even traded information, in spite of the fact that Darwin was usually in England and Wallace was usually in a reed hut somewhere in Indonesia.

The major drawback to the book, which kept me from giving it five stars, is that Ms. van Oosterzee suffers somewhat from a lack of focus, leaping from geo-zoology to plate tectonics to Wallace's own life to the eruption of Krakatau and back - it might have worked better had she devoted a chapter to each topic rather than jumping around so much.