This is Gould's fourth volume of essays reprinted, with postscripts, from Natural History.
"[...] the best writer of popular science now active."
– John Maynard-Smith, London Review of Books
"Gould himself is a rare and wonderful animal – a member of the endangered species known as the ruby-throated polymath [...] [He] is a leading theorist on large-scale patterns in evolution [...] [and] one of the sharpest and most humane thinkers in the sciences."
– David Quammen