
An Inordinate Fondness for Beetles
Campfire Conversations with Alfred Russel Wallace on People and Nature Based on Common Travel in the Malay Archipelago, The Land of the Orangutan, and the Bird of Paradise
Paul Spencer Sochaczewski(Author)
Explorer's Eye Press
2nd Edition
Published on 24. April 2017
Book
Paperback/Softback
490 pages
978-2-940573-26-4 (ISBN)
Description
An Inordinate Fondness for Beetles follows the Victorian-era explorations of Alfred Russel Wallace through Indonesia, Singapore, and Malaysia. While Wallace is recognized as co-discoverer of the theory of natural selection (and was perhaps deliberately sidelined by Darwin), he was also an edgy social commentator and a voracious collector of "natural productions"—he caught, skinned, and pickled 125,660 specimens, including 212 new species of birds and 900 new species of beetles.
Sochaczewski has created an innovative form of storytelling, combining incisive biography and personal travelogue. He examines themes about which Wallace cared deeply—women’s power, why boys leave home, the need to collect, our relationship with other species, humanity’s need to control nature and how this leads to nature destruction, arrogance, the role of ego and greed, white-brown and brown-brown colonialism, serendipity, passion, mysticism—and interprets them through his own filter with layers of humor, history, social commentary, and sometimes outrageous personal tales.
More details
Edition
2nd ed.
Language
English
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Unsewn / adhesive bound
Illustrations
Illustrations
Dimensions
Height: 216 mm
Width: 140 mm
Thickness: 29 mm
Weight
685 gr
ISBN-13
978-2-940573-26-4 (9782940573264)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Paul Spencer Sochaczewski has written Share Your Journey, the five-book series Curious Encounters of the Human Kind, An Inordinate Fondness for Beetles, The Sultan and the Mermaid Queen, Soul of the Tiger (co-authored with Jeff McNeely), and other acclaimed books and some 600 bylined articles in leading international publications. He has lived and worked in more than 80 countries, including long stints actively involved in nature conservation in Southeast Asia. He created and was director of WWF's global campaigns to protect tropical forests and biological diversity, helping to put these issues on the public agenda. He has other accomplishments that are mostly of such a dubious level of achievement that they are best left hidden from the general public ... although he is rather proud of the tomatoes he grows, his spaghetti carbonara and Indonesian fried rice, and his stubborn insistence on carrying his golf clubs.