I Have Landed: The End of a Beginning in Natural History

"I Have Landed", Stephen Jay Gould's tenth - and last - collection of essays compiled primarily from his Natural History magazine column "This View Of Life" is his most personal, touching on themes as diverse as his own family history, the relevance of science to art - and vice versa, and the meaning of evolution. There is a brilliant essay describing how Vladimir Nabokov was a fine scientist as well as a literary prose artist, and how his scientific skill in studying and describing butterflies proved invaluable in his fictional observations of people and their behavior. Another splendid essay examines how Freud struggled to understand evolutionary theory and make use of it in his own pioneering work in psychoanalysis. There are also Gould's eloquent rebuttals against those determined to remove evolution as a vital part of science education written for both the general public and his fellow scientists. Yet his most profound, most universal writing is saved for his own family history and how it oddly is tied to the tragic terrorist attacks on the United States over a year ago.Stephen Jay Gould was our finest popularizer of science and among natural history's most eloquent essayists. His untimely demise at the relatively young age of 60 is a tragic loss not only to paleobiology and evolutionary biology, but to all of humanity. "I Have Landed" is a fitting epitaph to Gould's glorious careers in science and the art of letters.

I Have Landed is the tenth and final collection of essays based on Gould's contributions to Natural History magazine, and provides over thirty writings that demonstrate his beliefs and scientific insights. From icebergs to the Andes, these are rich in observation and scientific insight and flavored with Gould's own particular spice of wry humor.

I was a little bit disconcerted when I saw the title of this, Stephen Jay Gould's last collection of essays. I thought: has he anticipated his own sadly premature death with the metaphoric "I Have Landed" or is this a kind of melancholy coincidence, or perhaps I am reading into the title something different from what it warrants?As it turns out, "I Have Landed" is not a reference to the Lethe shore of the poet, but a reference to his grandfather's arrival at Ellis Island on September 11, 1901, exactly, to the day, one century before the attack on the World Trade Center in New York. It is from this coincidence that Gould embarks upon some musings that form the touchstone for this, his tenth and last collection of essays.He is a man who will be sorely missed, a complete original, at once the very embodiment of a meticulous scientist and an establishment New York liberal. He is one of our greatest essayists, a humanist and a quintessentially rational man who has often argued in favor of the value and importance of religious thought. Born in modest circumstance, descendent of Hungarian immigrants (as was another of our most prolific writers, Isaac Asimov) he fell in love (as he recounts in these pages) with the NYC Museum of National History as a child and never lost his love for "the odd little tidbits," nor his sense of himself as a natural historian. He is a "student of snails" (p. 324), a classical nerd "shorter than average" (p. 246) who spent more time at the Hayden Planetarium and the Tyrannosaurus exhibition than he did playing his beloved baseball, a paleontologist who became not only a gifted essayist but an international celebrity.It's a neat trick what Stephen Jay Gould has done with his life, and it is a neat trick that he "chose" (if I may) to leave this vale of tears almost immediately after finishing not just this book, but more significantly, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, the "life work" of his "mature years, twenty years in the making and 1,500 pages in the printing." It has been noted that people typically die after a long illness not the day before Christmas or the day before their birthday or the day before the christening of their youngest grandchild, but the day after. And the very great choose to leave us only after they have finished some compelling project to which they have devoted the last years of their life. Gould remarked in the Preface on the coincidence of his finishing these twin projects together in time for publication in the "palindromic" year of 2002--(how he loves the odd fact, the detail that others might miss, and how he rejoices in sharing such "tidbits")--while recalling the earlier "conjunction" of the near simultaneous publication of his first book of collected essays, Ever Since Darwin, and his "first technical book for professional colleagues," Ontogeny and Phylogeny in 1977. I wonder if he knew that these would be the bookends of his life.This collection is touted on the blurb as "the m

I Have Landed: The End of a Beginning in Natural History by Stephen Jay Gould is his best to date... and I'm sorry to say his last, as he died May 20, 2002. God Rest Your Soul, Stephen.I Have Landed is a collection of essays, (thirty-one to be exact), and the scope and breath of these essays is broad. Gould has a way with words to bring complex subjects, casting new light upon them and bringing them to the common man with understanding and enlightenment. The book is divided into eight segments or groupings all of which are compelling and forthright. We see Gould's musing narrative and storytelling ability which brings together themes that have defined his career, humanistic disciplines, his mini intellectual biographies, intellectual palentology, and topics that bring obvious delight to him.As the reader goes from one subject to the next, we see that Gould has command and is ushering us on with his famous wit. This book is truly Gould's most revealing and personal opus. A brilliant mind, with good humor making the reader feel at home.I've enjoyed reading Gould's essays through the years, as others have, and as all good things come to and end... let me say adieu my friend.

I'm crying as I write this because Steve Gould just died of cancer, and he was a friend. No, I never met him, but I've read his essays for years and he was a brilliant man who wrote to you as if you were smart, too, but you just didn't know the inside terminology. This is the last book of his collected science essays from Natural History magazine, but his subjects are much wider than science. There's a lot of biology here, and a lot of why you should care about biology, but the most important thing is that this book -- like all of Steve's books -- is like listening to a friend who's fascinating. Each chapter here was a Natural History column and the subjects range from baseball to evolution. I know this is rambling on and I'm sorry. I will miss him, my smart friend Steve. As much as you can love someone you know only from his writing, I loved him. That's the kind of writer -- and scientist -- he was. He cared passionately about knowledge.