dsulliva@yale-com.UUCP (David Sullivan) (12/14/83)
----- News saved at Tue Dec 13 19:01:04 1983 "Late Night Reflections on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony" (great title) is not quite as good as Thomas' two earlier essay collections, as good as it is. "The Lives of a Cell" and "The Medusa and the Snail" are collections of diverse, optimistic, humanistic essays on biology. The new one is as well-written but is less diverse; most of the essays reiterate Thomas' fears about the arms race and nuclear weapons. Read the first two, if you haven't; they're the best! On the subject, what did people think of Thomas' autobiographical book, published earlier this year? One person I talked to highly recommended it; the NYT book review said that Thomas (who leads the top cancer research institute in the US, incidentally) couldn't write a sustained work as well as a short essay. Has anyone read Stephen Jay Gould's biological essays? They're published "Horses' Teeth and Hens' Toes" and one other book. How do they compare with Thomas' essays? david sullivan !yale-comix!dsulliva