An Explorer's Notebook

November 4, 2013
With 33 essays spanning 27 years, the collection from Australian scientist, explorer, and conservationist Flannery covers a lot of ground, both geographically and philosophically. This range is both an asset and a drawback. Given the breadth of coverage, there’s likely something for everyone, but the short essays do not fully satisfy. Many of the early pieces were published in Australian Natural History and detail some of Flannery’s expeditions to wild places like the Star Mountains of Papua New Guinea and the Gold Ridge of Guadalcanal. While the adventures are interesting, the writing feels lackluster. The book’s largest section consists of book reviews, most of which were originally published in the New York Review of Books. Even though many of the titles covered are now over a decade old, the reviews are a joy to read, as Flannery embeds his analysis in a larger scientific and political context. The final section includes essays on climate change, and while Flannery’s passion is evident, the short pieces are superficial. They are also dated; the optimism of his final essay in which he asserts that meaningful global understanding and change is finally occurring has certainly not panned out as he assumed.

December 15, 2013
Best known for his best-selling The Weather Makers (2006), Flannery offers a look back on his career and how he developed from a curious young researcher into a renowned expert on climate change. This collection of essays spans 25 years, beginning with Flannery as a young researcher studying kangaroos and fossils in Australia, later as a biologist exploring the rain forests of Melanesia, and more recently as an environmentalist wrestling with issues of climate change. He describes defleshing a kangaroo road-kill carcass to collect specimens, being visited in mountain camps by a bird of paradise, stumbling across an unknown species of rat in the rain forest, and negotiating with the people of the Solomon Islands for what they considered a fair price for entering their land. He offers insights behind scientific reconstruction of ancient species and ties the evolutionary process to more modern-day concerns about a changing environment. Flannery also offers observations on the interconnections of life, love, and resources as we address challenges to the environment. Photographs enhance Flannery's richly detailed accounts of his work and life as an explorer.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)

January 15, 2014
An eminent Australian scientist and environmentalist's collection of 33 highly readable essays and book reviews published between 1985 and 2012. Flannery (Among the Islands: Adventures in the Pacific, 2012, etc.) began his career as a student field biologist in the 1970s. By the 1980s, he was studying fossils as well as the evolution of kangaroos. Realizing that "rainforests were the habitat of much of Australia's flora and fauna," the author began studying living rain forests. This led to an interest in how climate influenced life on the planet both in the past and present. In this book, Flannery offers readers insight into his extraordinary career through selected essays he wrote about his own work as well as about the books that have shaped his thinking. The first section focuses on articles Flannery produced during almost 20 years in the field. It includes fascinating accounts of journeys he made to New Guinea to rediscover the elusive Bulmer's fruit bat and to study rare species of tree kangaroos. In the second section, Flannery gathers together the reviews he wrote for the New York Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement. His reading tastes run the gamut from ecological investigations by Sir David Attenborough to natural histories of man-eating predators and scorpions to biographies about John James Audubon and Rachel Carson; the reviews are both eloquent and trenchant. In the third section of the book, Flannery shares his articles on climate change. Written in the first decade of the 21st century, most of these essays critique the Australian government's "disparagement" of renewable energy in favor of "dirty" and/or dangerous sources like coal and nuclear power. This last section is the weakest of the book, largely due to the fact that the essays (which were published between 2006 and 2007) are somewhat dated. Accessible, provocative and well worth investigating.

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September 15, 2013

An international best-selling author who has discovered more species than Charles Darwin, Flannery presents 30 pieces written over 25 years that constitute a portrait of his education as a scientist. Readers travel to New Guinea and Indonesia to meet the people and animals Flannery has encountered.

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