Overview

From “one of the most fascinating and thought-provoking writers of natural history” (The Seattle Times), a collection of enduring essays that form a bestiary of wondrous creatures and a gallery of the human faces that peer at them. The Boilerplate Rhino brings together twenty-six of David Quammen’s most thoughtful and engaging essays from his column for Outside magazine, gifting readers with an irrepressible assortment of ideas to explore, conundrums to contemplate, and wondrous creatures to behold. 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.

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Reviews

David Williams The Seattle Times One of the most fascinating and though-provoking writers of natural history.

David Williams The Seattle Times One of the most fascinating and though-provoking writers of natural history.

David Williams The Seattle Times One of the most fascinating and though-provoking writers of natural history. Mike Weilbacher The Philadelphia Inquirer He is the only nature writer who makes you laugh out loud.

The only downside to this collection of Quammen's (Wild Thoughts from Wild Places, 1997, etc.) natural history essaysand it is a painful oneis the reminder that he no longer writes them on a monthly basis. Here is Quammen doing what he does like no other, knocking about in nature, one eye skinned for the curious organisms through which he explores big questions, the other on the lookout for a suitable opportunity to stick his finger in the eye of our species-specific complacency and self-delusion. Like the cats (Felis sylvestris) he so admires, Quammen walks alone. He is an odd fellow, not self-consciously so, but rather for the fresh and unexpected take he brings to such puzzles as ``what drives the evolution of bizarre forms of penis' and ``does the female sea horse take foolish pride in the size of her thing'? Or why Tyrannosaurus rex ought to be the state bird of Montana. Or why two one-eyed poets are masters of the exigent art of seeing. Or what motivates the plague of defenestrated cats. Through such probings, improbable as it may seem, Quammen raises other grander questionsand infers a direction in which answers may lieabout the ``confusion of good logic and bad logic, earned emotion and specious emotion.' If at times he pursues in his work ``a fascinating scientific question that might lend itself rather well to vulgarization and mockery,' more often he discovers something jarring and demanding: ``a chimpanzee, confronting its own reflected image, is capable of self-recognition. But humans look in a mirror and see only God.' It is a rare and beautiful thing, Quammen's entertaining, challenging, and sustained brilliance. No wonder he needed a break from the monthly grind; it must have been like giving blood one too many times. (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Information

David Quammen’s books include Breathless, The Tangled Tree, The Song of the Dodo, The Reluctant Mr. Darwin, and Spillover. He has written for The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, The Atlantic, National Geographic, and Outside, among other magazines, and is a three-time winner of the National Magazine Award. Quammen shares a home in Bozeman, Montana, with his wife, Betsy Gaines Quammen, author of American Zion, and with three Russian wolfhounds, a cross-eyed cat, and a rescue python. Visit him at DavidQuammen.com.

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