Volume 26, Number 19 · December 6, 1979
Variations on an Idée Fixe
By Bruce Chatwin
The Year of the Greylag Goose
by Konrad Lorenz, translated by Robert Martin, photographs by Sybille Kalas, by Klaus Kalas
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich/a Helen and Kurt Wolff book, 199, 147 illus pp., $25.00
Admirers of King Solomon's Ring and Man Meets Dog will be relieved that Konrad Lorenz has reverted to his earlier vein. His last two books must have been a bitter disappointment, even to those who accepted On Aggression as a work of oracular significance. One of them, entitled Behind the Mirror, purported to be a 'search for a Natural History of Human Knowledge,' but was impenetrable to the nonacademic reader. The other, Civilized Man's Eight Deadly Sins, was easy enough—a diatribe in the language of the world-saver that dragged out the musty metaphors of social Darwinism and could have been written in the late Thirties. Overpopulation and the ruin of landscape were galloping cancers. He inveighed against the inertia of public opinion; the universal mania for the new; the lack of courtship rituals that made for stable marriages; and he feared that our civilization would fall to the less pampered peoples of the East.
Review, 2529 words
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