I Have Landed: Splashes and Reflections in Natural History (Paperback)

~ Stephen Jay Gould (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Review

Popular evolutionary theorist and essayist Stephen Jay Gould brings together in this volume the last of a series of articles begun for Natural History magazine in 1977. The book finishes a 24-year list of works distinguished by their uniform warmth, humanity and lively intelligence, in which Gould expands with energy and clarity on a range of topics covering everything from palaeontology to Gilbert and Sullivan. His love of peculiarity defines a style as unique as its subjects: an extraordinary intellect, drawing effortlessly on strings from many bows, to produce elegantly crafted and subtly argued scholarly entertainments of unfailing interest and charm. In this collection - the last he wrote before his death - Gould gathers a series of academic meditations infused with a grand flavour of completeness; the title essay marks the centennial year of his grandfather's arrival on American soil, in the mathematically millennial year of 2001, while the anthology itself contains his 300th, and final, essay for the magazine. The focus of the essays remains on the themes Gould has developed as his own through the period of his popular publishing: the gentle disintegration of human arrogance and gleeful exposure of the parochiality of accepted wisdom. His mastery lies in the ability to evoke a complete picture by focusing on its detail; examples are selected with a magpie's eye for charm and enlarged to reveal startling and often profound truths. A coda taken from a distressing example of synchronicity - the American history of the Gould family begins on September 11, 1901 - draws a vital, and very personal, curtain on these intellectual delights, which are of uniform excellence and humility. The book preceding it provides a stage on which Gould's considerable talents dance, beautifully, one last time. (Kirkus UK)

Thirty-one sprightly and invaluable essays, in which the play of "little odd tidbits as illustrations of general theories" the author has raised to an art form. In his tenth and final collection of Natural History columns (after The Lying Stones of Marrakech, 2000, etc.), Gould is back in his favorite terrain of posing and then poking at intellectual puzzles, in which he has embedded some humanistic concern or referent in order to gain some better understanding of a scientific theme. Gould has never been a lyrical exalter of science and nature, but a taskmaster who might popularize his essays-namely, keep them free of exclusionary jargon-even while he demands the unwavering attention of his readers to follow his scientific peregrinations. How else to appreciate the commonalities between ex-Red Sox first baseman Bill Bruckner's weary legs and a letter written by Jim Bowie shortly before he died at the Alamo (hint: it has something to do with canonical stories and the distortion of acts)? Gould is a delight when leveling his heavy guns at the fatuous ("the anachronistic fallacy of using a known present to misread a past circumstance") and the confused: "science is an inquiry about the factual sate of the natural world, religion as a search for spiritual meaning and ethical values." Ever the gadfly, though, he'll follow that with "Science does not deal in certainty, so 'fact' can only mean a proposition affirmed to such a high degree that it would be perverse to withhold one's provisional assent." Gould's world is rich in quirks and contradictions, human foibles and natural diversity, the sublime and the bumptious, high grandeur and low comedy, whether he is addressing the Linnaen system of classification or the destruction of the World Trade Center. No more Natural History columns, but the future will no doubt see much more from Gould, a self-described addict of the short form. These essays trail in his wake like mushrooms after a rain. (b&w illustrations) (Kirkus Reviews) --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Description

Stephen Jay Gould's writing remains the modern standard by which popular science writing is judged. Throughout his work Gould has developed a distinctive and personal form of essay to treat great scientific issues in the context of biography. Here, Gould once again applied biographical perspectives to the illumination of key scientific concepts and their history, ranging from the discovery of the new scourge of syphilis by Fracastero in the sixteenth century and Isabelle Duncan's nineteenth-century attempt at reconciling scripture and palaeontology to Freud's weird speculations about human phylogeny and recent creationist attacks on the study of evolution. As always, the essays brilliantly illuminate and elucidate the puzzles and paradoxes great and small that have fuelled the enterprise of science and opened our eyes to a world of unexpected wonders.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 432 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (June 5, 2003)
• ISBN-10: 0099749718
• ISBN-13: 978-0099749714
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
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• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #496,098 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)