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When writer and intrepid traveller Sarah Woods set about discovering the jungles of Central and South America, her quest – to catch sight of one of the few last breeding pairs of Harpy eagles – took her into some of the most remote tangles of vine-knotted jungles on the planet. In Panama’s rain-soaked Chiriqu highlands, she navigated seemingly impassable trails with a machete to reach Quetzals with resplendent jewel tone plumage. Sarah sought the native wisdom of the indigenous Embera deep in the Darien Jungle in order to encounter the world’s largest and most powerful birds of prey, the elusive Harpy Eagle. Using razor-sharp talons to hunt and kill sloths and monkeys with deadly precision, these mammoth, winged dinosaurs hide a lesser-known, softer side: devoting great care to raising their young for the first two years of their life. Seldom seen in the wild, Sarah struggled to demystify the fear-riddled legends and superstitions that earned the Harpy Eagle its name from early explorers. Sarah’s voyage taught her much about the rich glories and mesmerising spectacle of the natural world and also its challenges and dangers.
She met the albino ‘moon children’ of Kuna Yala, swam in the Panama Canal, encountered left-wing guerrillas at the heart of Colombia’s five-decade conflict, and witnessed the Amazonian shape-shifting beliefs of the jungle afterlife. Sarah survived landslides, crash landings, mammoth floods and culture clashes in mysterious untrodden lands, learning much about aspects of herself from the incredible wildlife and tribal peoples she encountered – arguably her biggest journey.

In her nearly 60-year career as a groundbreaking primatologist and a passionate conservationist, Jane Goodall has touched the hearts of millions of people. This book is a collection of testimonies by her friends and colleagues honouring her as a scientific pioneer, an inspiring teacher, a devoted friend, and an engaging spirit whose complex personality tends to break down usual categories. Jane Goodall is the celebrity who transcends celebrity. The distinguished scientist who’s open to nonscientific ways of seeing and thinking. The human who has lived among non-humans. She is a thoughtful adult with depth and sobriety who also possesses a child’s psychological immediacy and sense of wonder. She is a great scientific pioneer, and yet her pioneering work goes far beyond producing advances in scientific knowledge. The more than 100 original pieces included in this inspirational collection give us a sense of her amazing reach and the power of the “Jane effect.”

Sir David Attenborough is Britain’s best-known natural history film-maker. His career as a naturalist and broadcaster has spanned nearly six decades, and in this volume of memoirs Sir David tells stories of the people and animals he has met and the places he has visited. A lot has changed since his first television documentary, and in this updated edition of Life on Air Sir David tells us of his experiences of filming in the 21st century. Also available in paperback [stock id 35782].

Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913), colleague of Charles Darwin, co-discoverer of the principle of natural selection, “father” of the field of evolutionary biogeography, vocal socialist and spiritualist, land reform theorist, intense social critic, etc., etc., was one of the most captivating figures of his time. Wallace began his professional career through two great natural history collecting expeditions, one to the Amazon and the other to the Australasian Archipelago; so successful were these that many observers would place him as the front-ranking field naturalist of all time. after he returned to England in 1862, however, his professional emphasis shifted toward writing. His published works included more than twenty books and close to a thousand other items: technical scientific papers, essays, commentaries, book reviews, and, not least, some three hundred letters to the Editor. It is in the last that his temperament comes out most strongly, and it is our privilege in the present work to reproduce more than two hundred of these, extending to all of his many intellectual passions. The philosopher Charles Peirce once wrote of Wallace that he “never wrote a dull line in his life, and couldn’t if he tried”, and the reader here can expect to be entertained accordingly.

This title is not held in stock but we are happy to supply on special order. Please contact us. This is a definitive, deeply researched biography of Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936). Todes makes use of a wealth of archival material to portray Pavlov’s personality, life, times, and scientific work. Combining personal documents with a close reading of scientific texts, Todes fundamentally reinterprets Pavlov’s famous research on conditional reflexes. Contrary to legend, Pavlov was not a behaviorist (a misimpression captured in the false iconic image of his “training a dog to salivate to the sound of a bell”); rather, he sought to explain not simply external behaviors, but the emotional and intellectual life of animals and humans. This iconic “objectivist” was actually a profoundly anthropomorphic thinker whose science was suffused with his own experiences, values, and subjective interpretations. This book is also a traditional “life and times” biography that weaves Pavlov into some 100 years of Russian history-particularly that of its intelligentsia-from the emancipation of the serfs to Stalin’s time.
Pavlov was born to a family of priests in provincial Ryazan before the serfs were emancipated, made his home and professional success in the glittering capital of St. Petersburg in late imperial Russia, suffered the cataclysmic destruction of his world during the Bolshevik seizure of power and civil war of 1917-1921, rebuilt his life in his 70s as a “prosperous dissident” during the Leninist 1920s, and flourished professionally as never before in 1929-1936 during the industrialization, revolution, and terror of Stalin. Todes’s story of this powerful personality and extraordinary man is based upon interviews with surviving coworkers and family members (along with never-before-analyzed taped interviews from the 1960s and 1970s), examination of hundreds of scientific works by Pavlov and his coworkers, and close analysis of materials from some twenty-five archives.
The documents range from the records of his student years at Ryazan Seminary to the transcripts of the Communist Party cells in his labs, and from his scientific manuscripts and notebooks to his political speeches; they include revealing love letters to his future wife and correspondence with hundreds of lay people, scholars, artists, and Communist Party leaders; and unpublished memoirs by many coworkers, his daughter, his wife, and his lover.

Memoirs of the Queensland Museum/Culture Volume 7(1). These diaries reveal how Leichardt navigated his way from Sydney society to scientific traveller, along the way acquiring the array of skills that define a ‘bushman’. The pages illuminate the state of European settlement, the nature of aboriginal culture and the geography of the Australian east coast with detailed observations on the natural world. His earnest intent as a scholar of science and his outstanding ability are demonstated beyond doubt.