Dr. Edward A. Wilson (1872-1912) is widely regarded as one of the finest artists ever to have worked in the Antarctic. Sailing with Captain Scott aboard 'Discovery' (1901-1904), he became the last in a long tradition of 'exploration artists' from an age when pencil and water-colour were the main met[...]

Along with Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, Edward Thomas is by any reckoning a major first world war poet. A war poet is not one who chooses to commemorate or celebrate a war, but one who reacts against having a war thrust upon him. His great friend Robert Frost wrote 'his poetry is so very brave, so unco[...]

In recent years, articles in major periodicals from the New York Times Magazine to the Times Literary Supplement have heralded the arrival of a new school of literary studies that promises-or threatens-to profoundly shift the current paradigm. This revolutionary approach, known as Darwinian literary[...]

In this groundbreaking new book, one of the world's greatest living scientists argues for the fundamental unity of all knowledge and the need to search for what he calls consilience, the composition of the principles governing every branch of learning. Edward O Wilson, the pioneer of sociobiology an[...]

A gift collection of Darwin's four seminal works, introduced and edited by a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning Harvard professor, includes Voyage of the H.M.S. Beagle, The Origin of Species, The Descent of Man, and The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals, in a volume complemented by an index tha[...]

One doesn't have to be Jewish to recognize the words which have made their way into every fold of popular language: Chutzpah, Mensch, Tokhes, Mishmash, Nudge, Shtick, Schmaltzy, Schlep, Icky, and so on. Then there are phrases whose meaning and syntax are borrowed from Yiddish: "bite your tongue," "d[...]

First published in 1962, Silent Spring alerted a large audience to the environmental and human dangers of indiscriminate use of pesticides, spurring revolutionary changes in the laws affecting our air, land, and water. “Silent Spring became a runaway bestseller, with international reverberation[...]

When this classic work was first published in 1975, it created a new discipline and started a tumultuous round in the age-old nature versus nurture debate. This book is widely known as the object of bitter attacks by social scientists and other scholars who opposed its claim that human social behavi[...]

Independent Publisher Book Award for Best Science Book Winner of the 2003 Professional/Scholarly Publishing Award of the Association of American Publishers, Biology Category Imagine beetles ejecting defensive sprays as hot as boiling water; female moths holding their mates for ransom; caterpillars d[...]

Once in a great while, as the New York Times noted recently, a naturalist writes a book that changes the way people look at the living world. John James Audubon's Birds of America, published in 1838, was one. Roger Tory Peterson's 1934 Field Guide to the Birds was another. How does such insight into[...]