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St Vladimir Nabokov's second career as a lepidopterist ...
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Subject: Vladimir Nabokov's second career as a lepidopterist ...
Date: Sun, 09 Jun 2002 16:21:17 -0400
From: "Sandy P. Klein" <spklein52@hotmail.com>
Reply-To: SPKlein52@HotMail.com
To: chtodel@gte.net
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[The New York Times]
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/09/books/09BRIEF.html
June 9, 2002
Books in Brief: Non Fiction
By DAVID MURRAY
I HAVE LANDED
The End of a Beginning in Natural History.
By Stephen Jay Gould.
Harmony, $25.95.
The title of Stephen Jay Gould's 22nd book on natural science borrows a
phrase his grandfather scribbled in an English primer after he arrived
at Ellis Island: ''I have landed. Sept. 11, 1901.'' Last year Gould, an
evolutionary biologist at Harvard, ended an unbroken run of 300 columns
in Natural History magazine; ''I Have Landed'' would have been a simple
collection of his final essays if the World Trade Center had not
collapsed on the centennial of his grandfather's arrival; the weird
coincidence of dates inspired a handful of shorter pieces tacked onto
the end about Americanism, evil and the New York skyline. Gould's mind
likes to scurry into every corner of high and low culture. He
investigates Gilbert and Sullivan, myths of the Alamo, forgotten female
naturalists and Vladimir Nabokov's second career as a lepidopterist. But
he always returns to the theme of Darwinism. For Gould, the theory of
evolution offers a vision of an ancient and continuous ''tree of life,''
linking all creatures, and he applies this idea of continuity to his own
catholic interests. The Nabokov essay, for example, starts with a bland
debate over how the novelist's butterfly collecting and classifying
might have informed (or detracted from) his fiction; but the piece ends
with a fierce argument against the wall between literature and science
-- a wall that Gould, who died last month, spent a career trying to
topple.
-- Michael Scott Moore
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