"Quammen's writing style is so delightful that his content could almost be secondary. Happily, the author and his subjects are equally engaging: from a light-hearted trope on crows, whom he surmises are 'too intelligent for their station in life'; to the dead-serious issue of human cloning, which he labels 'perniciously stupid'; to a harrowing 453-day adventure in a remote Congolese forest Quammen shared with explorer J. Michael Fay. A revised and expanded version of the out-of-print 1985 original, this volume reprints a number of Quammen's columns from Outside magazine along with more lengthy articles culled from sources like Audubon, National Geographic and Smithsonian, including a solid selection of his post-1985 work. In his introduction he describes the new version as 'a chimerical creature, like a griffin, bird-shaped in front with a mammalian caboose,' but his topics-and his tone-aren't always so whimsical; in 'Planet of Weeds,' a 1998 piece published in Harper's, he predicts man-made ecological catastrophe: 'Homo sapiens itself is the consummate weed.' A book to ponder and enjoy."—Publishers Weekly (starred review)