Quill and Quire

REVIEWS

« Back to
Book Reviews

By the Light of the Glow-Worm Lamp: Three Centuries of Reflections on Nature

by Alberto Manguel, ed.

Alberto Manguel has a way of making one stop and think. His internationally acclaimed anthology on reading (The History of Reading) made us reflect on how and what we read. Now, with By the Light of the Glow-Worm Lamp, he teaches us to see the outdoors in a different light.

Each essay in the anthology is a thoughtful reflection on some aspect of the natural world. Manguel does not include fictional or poetic musings; these essays are expository. They span 300 years of writing and provide us with a wide variety of perspectives. He places the pieces into four categories: Landscape, Birds, Beasts, and Insects and Fish.

The reader who prefers to flip from essay to essay can choose from authors as diverse as D.H. Lawrence, Theodore Roosevelt, and John James Audubon. We travel with Charles Darwin and see the beginnings of the theories that revolutionized the way we see ourselves, shoot the rapids in a boat with Henry David Thoreau, explore the other world of the sea with Rachel Carson, and return to our domestic world with a cautionary essay on cats by Edward Topsell.

But reading this book straight through has its own reward. Manguel places each piece very carefully. He gently leads us from one subject to the next, from one way of thinking and seeing to another. It’s not a quick read, but rather a book you curl up with for an hour or two to ponder.

The title comes from the final selection in the anthology, “Stars of the Earth” by L.M. Budgen. She observes the various types of insects that emit light, including the firefly and glowworm. She finds them wondrous; they suggest to her a vastness to Earth that we rarely take the time to notice. The glowworm may not emit enough light to read by, but if you observe carefully, it may illuminate for you a truth that can’t be found in any book.

 

Reviewer: Deborah Dundas

Publisher: Plenum Press/V& L Information Resources Corp.

DETAILS

Price: $32.5

Page Count: 362 pp

Format: Cloth

ISBN: 0-306-45991-4

Released: Nov.

Issue Date: 1998-12

Categories: Science, Technology & Environment