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Title: Very bad, grating prose; interesting subject matter
Review: Just a heads up: though David Quammen has won awards for his prose, it's grating and full of segways. Just a sample, picked randomly from one of his nature essays (Time and Motion Study): "We've all heard the canard (masquerading as scientific fact that someone remembered someone else having read somewhere, always untraceable and unconfirmed) that the flight of a bumblebee is aerodynamically inexplicable". It's like this throughout. Quammen comes across as a pretentious, book-learned auto mechanic.If you can stomach the prose then the articles are interesting for the few factual titbits. But Quammen is a difficult read because of the ackward prose.A better writer for non-fiction is John McPhee. A better writer, period, is Ernst Hemingway.
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