http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/09/books/09BRIEF.html
June 9, 2002
Books in Brief: Non Fiction
By DAVID MURRAY
I HAVE LANDED
The End of a Beginning in Natural History.
By Stephen Jay Gould.
Harmony, $25.95.
The title of Stephen Jay Gould's 22nd book on natural science borrows
a phrase his grandfather scribbled in an English primer after he arrived
at Ellis Island: ''I have landed. Sept. 11, 1901.'' Last year Gould, an
evolutionary biologist at Harvard, ended an unbroken run of 300 columns
in Natural History magazine; ''I Have Landed'' would have been a simple
collection of his final essays if the World Trade Center had not collapsed
on the centennial of his grandfather's arrival; the weird coincidence of
dates inspired a handful of shorter pieces tacked onto the end about Americanism,
evil and the New York skyline. Gould's mind likes to scurry into every
corner of high and low culture. He investigates Gilbert and Sullivan,
myths of the Alamo, forgotten female naturalists and Vladimir Nabokov's
second career as a lepidopterist. But he always returns to the theme
of Darwinism. For Gould, the theory of evolution offers a vision of an
ancient and continuous ''tree of life,'' linking all creatures, and he
applies this idea of continuity to his own catholic interests. The Nabokov
essay, for example, starts with a bland debate over how the novelist's
butterfly collecting and classifying might have informed (or detracted
from) his fiction; but the piece ends with a fierce argument against the
wall between literature and science -- a wall that Gould, who died last
month, spent a career trying to topple.
-- Michael Scott Moore