Islands: Portraits of Miniature Worlds
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
Louise Young, a geophysical scientist, is a lover of islands. Faced with a life-threatening illness 35 years ago, she vowed to throw herself into far-flung travels, to collect exotic places that still "retain a distinctive personality or whose story illuminates a significant aspect of man's relationship with nature."
The fruit of those travels is this fine book of essays, part memoir, part travelogue, part natural-history commentary. Young opens with an overview of island geography, noting the ways in which islands form in geological time and how the mere fact of isolation has both spawned wondrous life forms and inflicted "the unfavorable results of genetic inbreeding," one of the factors responsible for species extinction. She travels to places such as Easter Island, a study in what happens when humans too vigorously disturb ecological balances, in this case through deforestation that resulted in soil erosion and changed climatic conditions; the gold- and spice-rich islands of Indonesia; Mauritius and the Seychelles, the former habitat of the unfortunate dodo and fabulously rare sea coconut tree, which produces the heaviest seeds of any plant in the world; and the Bahamas. Her book, a must for fellow island lovers, closes with a careful examination of the myth of Atlantis, and with a call for humans to be more watchful of sensitive ecosystems everywhere on island Earth. --Gregory McNamee
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
From Scientific American
Young's verbal portraits are handsomely framed by apt quotations from the likes of Shakespeare, Browning and Ovid as chapter headings and by elegant drawings of island fauna and phenomena by Jennifer Dewey. "The remoteness of islands surrounds them with a certain mystery," environmentalist and geophysicist Young says, "and their isolation is responsible for their individual characteristics and evolutionary history." She portrays vividly the characteristics and the evolutionary history of 12 islands or island groups--among them the Hawaiian archipelago, the Galápagos, Easter Island and Madagascar--and also treats Earth itself as "an island in the universe."
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
Islands: Portraits of Miniature Worlds
Islands: Portraits of Miniature Worlds,Louise B. Young,W.H. Freeman & Company,0716739666,Earth Sciences - General,Ecology,Environmental Conservation & Protection - General,Environmental Studies,Essays,Life Sciences - Ecology,Nature/Ecology,Science
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