Bryson share his experiences hiking the Appalachian Trail with a childhood friend. The two encounter eccentric characters, a blizzard, getting lost, and rude yuppies along the way.

For more than twenty-five years, paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould wrote a column called "The View of Life" for Natural History magazine. More than twenty entries from that column comprise this collection, which includes such essays as "Boyle's Law and Darwin's Details," "Brotherhood by Inversion (or, As the Worm Turns)," "Darwin's American Soulmate," "The Diet of Worms and Defenestration of Prague," "The Dodo in the Caucus Race," "Reversing Established...

Collects over one hundred specimens of the natural world, profiling rocks and minerals, microscopic life, plants, and animals.

Collects sixty-seven informational charts exploring habitats, food chains, animal anatomy, and other facets of the natural world.

"Provocative and delightfully discursive essays on natural history . . . Gould is the Stan Musial of essay writing. He can work himself into a corkscrew of ideas and improbable allusions paragraph after paragraph and then, uncoiling, hit it with such power that his fans know they are experiencing the game of essay writing at its best." -John Noble Wilford, New York Times Book Review