An Urchin in the Storm

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An Urchin in the Storm is a volume of collected essays from paleontologist and well-known science writer Stephen Jay Gould. All but one of the essays had originally appeared in The New York Review of Books. Grouped by theme, the sections of the book deal respectively with the irreducibility of history (and the pleasures and challenges of contingency) in its two principal domains of life and the earth, nature's complexity, the theory and consequence of biological determinism, and rationalism in explanation.

The books reviewed by Gould are:

• "How Does a Panda Fit?":
  • George B. Schaller, Hu Jinchu, Pan Wenshi, and Zhu Jing, The Giant Pandas of Wolong
• "Cardboard Darwinism":
  • Philip Kitcher, Vaulting Ambition
  • Anne Fausto-Sterling, Myths of Gender
  • Bettyann Kevles, Females of the Species: Sex and Survival in the Animal Kingdom
• "Misserving Memory":
  • Loren Eiseley, Darwin and the Mysterious Mr. X: New Light on the Evolutionists
• "The Ghost of Protagoras":
  • John Tyler Bonner, The Evolution of Culture in Animals
  • Peter J. Wilson, Man, the Promising Primate
• "The Power of Narrative":
  • Martin J. S. Rudwick, The Great Devonian Controversy: The Shaping of Scientific Knowledge among Gentlemanly Specialists
• "Deep Time and Ceaseless Motion":
  • John McPhee, Basin and Range
  • Roy Porter (ed.) and William Herbert Hobbs, The Earth Generated and Anatomized
• "Genes on the Brain":
  • Charles L. Lumsden and Edward O. Wilson, Promethian Fire: Reflections on the Origin of Mind
• "Jensen's Last Stand":
  • Arthur R. Jensen, Bias in Mental Testing
• "Nurturing Nature":
  • Richard C. Lewontin, Steven Rose, and Leon J. Kamin, Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ideology and Human Nature
• "Triumph of a Naturalist":
  • Evelyn Fox Keller, A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock
• "Thwarted Genius"
  • Kenneth R. Manning, Black Apollo of Science: The Life of Ernest Everett Just
• "Exultation and Explanation":
  • G. Evelyn Hutchinson, The Kindly Fruits of the Earth: Recollections of an Embryo Ecologist
  • G. Evelyn Hutchinson, An Introduction to Population Ecology
• "Calling Dr. Thomas":
  • Lewis Thomas, The Youngest Science: Notes of a Medicine Worker
• "Pleasant Dreams":
  • Freeman Dyson, Disturbing the Universe
• "The Perils of Hope":
  • Robert Jastrow, The Enchanted Loom: Mind in the Universe
• "Utopia, Limited":
  • Fritjof Capra, The Turning Point: Science, Society, and the Rising Culture
• "Integrity and Mr. Rifkin":
  • Jeremy Rifkin, Algeny
• "The Quack Detector":
  • Martin Gardner, Science: Good, Bad and Bogus