Naturalist

Rating:
Summary: Better Late Than Never
Review: I had always thought a scientist of the calibre of Dr. E. O. Wilson was perhaps out of my league; I'd partly read his Diversity of Life and perhaps got the most out of it by jumping around and reading what interested me. His other famous books seemed too specialized for me, basically a lover of fiction or action stories. However, I saw recently that Wilson had endorsed the book jacket of "Nabokov's Butterflies", one of my favorite writers, whose biography "Nabokov's Blues" was a great read last year. "Naturalist" is a word often spurned by modern scientists, I'm told; its sometimes another word for generalist-- whom "real" scientists often don't take seriously. Nabokov had been one (and not often taken seriously); it interested me that Wilson would use that term to describe his own journey into professional science. What Wilson explains so well here, in his own story, is that it is growing up with a FASCINATION with nature, first perhaps as only a hobby, that based on this "fascination for life", great scientists are sometimes born. Wilson makes the point, echoed by another commentator above, that all of us with a fascination for nature are not so different and perhaps science has not done itself a service by make its field seem so rarified and only for that highly educated PhD. FIRST perhaps comes the youthful fascination with things that then leads to the productive scientist. I know when I was a kid I enjoyed reading the biographies of John Audobon and other naturalists. E. O. Wilson was not well known at the time. But, any youth, parent or teacher who wants to get a proper perspective on what seems to make great scientists, that is, the ongoing fascination with life itself and what makes it tick, will find great support in this biography of, yes, a famous Harvard professor, but also a person not so different from you and me. An autobiography worth reading.

Rating:
Summary: An inside look at a true scientist
Review: This book gives one a real sense of what the natural world is like through the eyes of a very influential naturalist. This book follows the life of E.O. Wilson from childhood to show how the outside world impacted his life. A great read!!

Rating:
Summary: One of the most interesting autobiographies ever
Review: To me, it looks as if Wilson turned to be a great scientist against all odds. He did not come from the academic royalty, but from a broken family in Alabama. With strong intuition, lot of hard work and endless enthusiasm, he became one of the great scientists of the 20th century. A well written book, that would probably change the course of my life have I read it at the right age...