Volume 49, Number 15 · October 10, 2002
Living on the Wind
By Tim Flannery
Eye of the Albatross: Visions of Hope and Survival
by Carl Safina
Holt, 377 pp., $27.50
Sailing Alone Around the World
by Captain Joshua Slocum
Penguin, 273 pp., $7.95 (paper)
In January 1832 Charles Darwin found himself off Cape Horn aboard the Beagle in the midst of a ferocious storm. 'The sight of such a coast,' he would later say of parts of the region, 'is enough to make a landsman dream for a week about death, peril, and shipwreck.'* Yet so ardent was the young naturalist's curiosity that even when tempest-tossed he found his attention focused on a bird. 'Whilst we were heavily labouring, it was curious to see how the Albatross with its widely expanded wings, glided right up the wind,' wrote the man who would later teach the world that such superb adaptation is the result of millions of years of evolutionary change.
Review, 3051 words
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