The Ghost with Trembling Wings: Science, Wishful Thinking and the Search for Lost Species

by Scott Weidensaul

Book Overview

"A thoughtful examination of the machinery of extinction . . . By turns harrowing and elegiac, thrilling and informative." --Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times Three or four times an hour, eighty or... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0374246645
• ISBN13: 9780374246648
• Release Date: June 2002
• Publisher: North Point Press
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 1.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.3" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

A gorgeous mind-opener

For 310 of the most engrossing pages about things that live on earth, you won't do much better than Scott Wiedensaul's The Ghost With Trembling Wings. I came at the book with virtually no science ability and only a passing knowledge of naturalism or species conservation, but it doesn't matter - Trembling Wings works so effectively because all it really requires to catch onto Wiedensaul's point of view is any sort of awe at the variety of organisms and the varied regions in which they show up. Wiedensaul's prose is transporting in the best way - he gives the mosquito-encrusted white reaches of Siberia the same impressive eloquence that he gives the rivers of Louisiana or the Mato Grasso region of Brazil. His eloquence is so surprising, he manages to find poetry in the everyday actions of species, fascinating or not. Check out this description simply of film footage of the Thylacine in Tasmania: "Though the thylacine was said to be stiff and awkward in its movements, this one seemed as graceful as the cramped, artificial surroundings would permit; the film showed a lithe, tapered animal, but to an eye used to a dog or wolf, the proportions seemed a bit off - the head looked too long and conical, the ears too small, the almost tubular tail too straight and stiff." It's written mastery like that that makes The Ghost With Trembling Wings as beautifully specific as it is evocatively universal, giving vivid breadth to the human need to penetrate the outside world in whatever form rouses our deepest passions.

Superb Read!

A superb book. Fascinating, extermely well written and difficult to put down. Weidensaul renders his vast curiosity, observation,and love of nature contagious.

An engrossing, addictive book about species survival

Scott Weidensaul has written a fascinating, page-turning exploration of the complexities of species survival and extinction. From the first chapter, a narrative account of his personal search for the probably extinct Semper's Warbler on St. Lucia, to the last chapter where he may, or may not, have found the never before seen female cone-billed tanager, this book never let go of my imagination. Most of the sought-after species in this book are never found, but a few, such as the coelacanth and the almost-aurochs, are. The author looks for big cats rumored to be living in the English countryside, and tells of the accidental rediscovery of the Australian night parrot. He provides one of the few intelligent treatises on the Loch Ness Monster and other cryptobiological "species." Even though most possibly extinct animals are never found, it's the hunt for them that excites both the author and the reader. The often suspenseful narrative is peppered with history and sharp observations as well as varied opinions. The language is rich with visual and engaging details, the kind that makes you feel as though you've entered into the "land of the lost." Trust me, you won't fall asleep reading this book. This is lay science as it should be, full of mysteries and questions, both accessible and intelligent. The author's good humor and pithy insights lend a friendly tone to his science. For example, when he is fighting insects - in his ears, eyes, and under his watch band - during a frantic search for a specific flock of birds, he writes, "There is a reason lost species are lost in the first place. Sometimes the reasons are weighty and formidable, like civil unrest, impenetrable mountains, or bandit warlords who use visitors for target practice. Sometimes they are more prosaic, like bad roads and worse information. And sometimes the reason is sweat bees - too many sweat bees." This witty, conversational tone makes The Ghost With Trembling Wings as fun to read as it is instructional.I highly recommend this book to anyone with even the slightest interest in conservation, evolution, field biology, and environmentalism; however, you don't need to know a thing about the preceding fields to enjoy The Ghost With Trembling Wings. All you need is a healthy curiosity and the time to indulge it.

Some things I knew, most I didn't

I read quite a bit and this book is definitely one of the reasons why. It is a great read. I could not get enough about the thievery going on at museums in the past to fill collections... nor about the "Tully Monster" hoax put on by a close scientific colleague. I was sad through parts of it, laughing out loud in others, I just couldn't put it down.And finally, it was real interesting to read some good info on all the talk about cloning this and that, from Mammoths to Thylacines. Scott Weidensaul is an excellent science writer and I highly recommend this book.I am going to classify it in my library as real cryptozoology, and that is not a bad word in my home.

Contagiously thrilling hunts

Scott Weidensaul says early in this careful and remarkable book that he has "an untrained eye," but of course he's being much too humble. Weidensaul, an accomplished naturalist who seems also totally comfortable with people, traveled the globe for this book and he writes that the search for lost species is "a good deal more subtle than I'd originally realized." He calls the process of rediscovery "the many ways in which the lost come back from the grave," and explains that what at first may seem like the business of biology and science is in fact "enmeshed with human psychology, deep-seated desires, and the ways, accurate or imagined, in which we view our world." Later in his narrative he confesses that if he had one crack at a working time machine, he would without a doubt set it for "about twenty thousand years in the past." The last Ice Age would have had a terrific reporter in Weidensaul.There is a variety of famous and not so famous little-known and in some cases "extinct" creatures (Bachman's Warbler on the island of St. Lucia, the ivory-billed woodpecker, the Australian night parrot, the golden toad, and more) to be written about. Weidensaul delves into theories of hybridization, cloning, and numerous current issues in nature and science. As to the discovery of obscure or assumed-vanished species, he writes that finding an unknown plant or animal is not difficult since "the roughly one million species that scientists have named and catalogued may represent only a tenth to a thirtieth of the planet's total biota." For example, never-before catalogued species of birds emerge from the famously shrinking tropics at the rate of one or two per year.His stories combine reportage and layman's science with historical narrative. The writing, sometimes about complicated matters, is delightfully clear; you would be thrilled to find it in a good magazine that publishes high-quality nonfiction pieces of some length. He explains some of the bravery, hunches, and wonderfully educated guesswork, along with incredible heroism and pluck, that the scientific and naturalist communities have shown in the search for "lost" species. The author is present, but never the center of attention. He's a naturalist and a reporter; his stories are bracing and exciting. Weidensaul's grasp of issues in nature, science, the mysteries of lost species and the people who fight to find them is firm. There are notes, a bibliography, and 15-page index.