(Reviews)

Nature's Daredevil

High society bankrolled his exploits. Hollywood loved him. Radio listeners hung on his every word. So why is this once-famous naturalist now all but forgotten?

By Frank Graham Jr.

The Remarkable Life of William Beebe:Explorer and Naturalist
By Carol Grant Gould
Island Press/Shearwater Books, 447 pages, $30

The 16-year-old William Beebe, already an inveterate birdwatcher and bug collector, exulted at the end of 1893 that “to be a Naturalist is better than to be a King.”

As an adult he was to have it both ways. No naturalist before him had covered so much of our planet. Beebe ranged from Nova Scotia's mudflats and what he called the “high jungle” of South America to the skies over World War I battlefields and the depths many hundreds of feet down in the Atlantic Ocean. He was a convinced Darwinian long before enlightenment dawned on most of his peers.

Yet, though his travels included much danger and hardship, Beebe usually spent his off-hours living like royalty. He sailed to remote destinations aboard millionaires' yachts and partied with the luminaries of high society and the arts. Invariably, he was accompanied by an attractive woman; most times, but not always, she was one of his two wives. His files bulged with invitations from the likes of Katharine Hepburn, Rudyard Kipling, and Walt Disney. After receiving a copy of one of Beebe's popular books on his travels in exotic places, A.A. Milne of Winnie-the-Pooh fame wrote, “One of the few things in the world of which I am really proud is that I know Will Beebe.”

His influence on modern biology was incalculable. Beebe's studies in the South American rainforest first tracked the connections of even the most minute invertebrate animals to one another and to their environments, from beneath the soil to the treetops.

He pioneered the exploration of coral reefs and deep-sea life, paving the way for Jacques Cousteau and others. His massive monograph on the world's pheasants became a model of avian science, while his intensive observation of insects led to behavioral breakthroughs. Yet Beebe's work is oddly forgotten. As Carol Grant Gould, a veteran science writer, explains in this new biography: “Ironically, the very breadth of Beebe's knowledge and vision have worked against him in the recent era of specialization.” He was not an entomologist, an ornithologist, or a marine biologist. He earned no academic degree. Although he collected hundreds of species new to science, modern biologists don't know how to classify Beebe.

Growing up in suburban New Jersey, Beebe became a child prodigy in the natural sciences, a sort of Mozart of the boondocks. His capacity for observation was enormous. He seemed to succeed at whatever aspect of the arts or sciences he took up in earnest. As an undergraduate at Columbia University, he morphed into a valued staff member at the newly founded Bronx Zoo and declined to finish his degree. From then on he never looked back.

Before the establishment of the National Science Foundation in 1950, most scientific expeditions were privately funded, either by natural history museums and organizations or by wealthy patrons. Few ever milked this system better than Will Beebe. To the pursuit of funding for his expeditions he brought a natural talent for collecting animals of all kinds, a fabled personal charm, and modest skills in parlor games and playing musical instruments that made him the life of every party. People with money liked him, and he liked most of them. Wherever there was a jungle or a coral reef, Beebe headed that way. He was sure to be accompanied by a troop of biologists, artists, and wealthy hangers-on, and provided with the latest equipment, including, of course, needed supplies for the daily cocktail hour.

With his reputation gilded by travels to far places and by the brisk sale of his books, Beebe became a genuine celebrity. In 1932, when he made a major descent into the Atlantic in a primitive diving bell called a bathysphere, thousands listened intently to his voice on the radio, broadcast from nearly half a mile down. He also mastered such unusual activities of the time as flying a plane, taking motion pictures, and sounding erudite on radio quiz shows. The tabloids experienced a frisson of glee when his first wife deserted him for a younger man.

Gould has written a solid, engaging biography. True, she often resorts to her cliché box so that a scene “beggars the imagination,” scientists exhibit a “keen eye,” and boys become “fast friends.” But she adroitly blends natural history, relevant quotations, and society gossip to keep this narrative moving. She may also have helped to rescue an interesting and accomplished man from the cobwebs of history.

Editor's Choice

The Fluoride Deception
By Christopher Bryson
Seven Stories Press, 374 pages, $24.95

Most people still think of fluoride as nothing more than a dentist's tool in the fight against cavities. Nonetheless, it's also a toxic chemical—used in the steel, aluminum, phosphate, gasoline, refrigerants, and plastics industries—that has caused all kinds of health problems, from cancer to learning disabilities in children. In The Fluoride Deception investigative journalist Christopher Bryson uncovers how government conspiracies and scientific manipulation put a positive spin on a substance that was once “blamed for more damage claims against industry than all twenty other major air pollutants combined.” Bryson convincingly argues that the U.S. government and its industry cronies, fearful that bad press and constant litigation would halt their fledgling, fluoride-dependent nuclear program, successfully pitched water fluoridation as a way to improve the chemical's image. “History tells us that overturning myths is rarely easy,” Bryson writes. “But we have been down this path before. The fluoride story is similar to the fables about lead, tobacco, and asbestos, in which medical accomplices helped industry to hide the truth about these substances for generations.” The book, deftly reported throughout, never proves definitively that the one part per million added to the nation's drinking water is unsafe, but it will make you think twice before you gulp down your next glass of tap water.

—Jesse Greenspan

Tiger Bone & Rhino Horn: The Destruction of Wildlife for Traditional Chinese Medicine
By Richard Ellis
Island Press, 312 pages, $26.95

Instead of using synthetic remedies to cure their health woes, many Asians have increasingly turned to tiger bone, rhinoceros horn, bear gallbladder, and innumerable other plant and animal parts. This traditional Chinese medicine, as it is known, can be used for anything from impotency to cancer, but it is also causing a free fall in the populations of highly endangered tigers, black rhinos, and Asiatic black bears. “Tiger penis-bone soup is thought to be an aphrodisiac; eyeballs rolled into pills are thought to cure convulsions; whiskers protect one against bullets,” writes Richard Ellis in his latest book, Tiger Bone & Rhino Horn. A century ago hunting and habitat destruction, mostly by Westerners, pushed many large animals to the brink of extinction. (“If we didn't kill off all the fur seals and sea otters for their luxurious coats, or the whales for their baleen and oil, it was not for want of trying,” Ellis writes.) Now a seemingly insatiable appetite for Chinese medicinal products threatens to finish the job. Ellis's style is at times verbose, but his well-researched book presents staggering statistics about the illegal wildlife trade and brings to light an important issue too few people are aware of.

—J.G.

How to Be a (Bad) Birdwatcher
By Simon Barnes
Pantheon Books, 221 pages, $17.95

Can't tell a wrentit from a blue tit? Be not ashamed, says Simon Barnes. Join the ranks of “bad” birdwatchers, and hold your head high. Essayistic and droll, How to Be a (Bad) Birdwatcher is a paean to rookies with binoculars. For Barnes, a sportswriter for the London Times, bad birdwatching means celebrating one of life's true joys: unexpectedly catching sight of an ordinary bird doing its thing. Twitchers—the British term for life-list nerds—elbow one another out of the way in the quest for rarities and exotics. But bad birdwatchers can still notice a treeful of chickadees in a supermarket parking lot, finding themselves lost in appreciative contemplation. In midwinter Barnes sees a dunnock, “perhaps the drabbest bird in Britain . . . a dullish, brownish, smallish, skulking little thing that is about as common as another of his names—hedge sparrow—might suggest. . . . In that iron frost, he felt the tug of spring; and he sang his heart out as a result. . . . A common bird; a rare moment.” What Barnes is getting at is that most people like to look at birds—they're just put off by the language and trappings of birdwatching expertise. So how to become a “bad” birdwatcher? Bungle through. Never mind the obsessives. Most of all, follow Barnes's mantra: Just look and have fun.

—Kathleen McGowan

Art of the Wild

Jonathan Elphick's new book, Birds: The Art of Ornithology (Rizzoli, 335 pages, $60), reads like a chronological encyclopedia of bird artists, from Pliny the Elder to John James Audubon and John Gould through Roger Tory Peterson. The highlights of the book are 300 color plates of birds (including Roelandt Savery's dodo, above) taken from London's Natural History Museum. Bird paintings from various eras often look surprisingly similar, though the images do become more realistic and lifelike with each passing page. Throughout history most famous bird artists used stuffed specimens as models, so many species appear stiff, with slightly altered coloration. The beauty of the images, however, is unquestionable.

—J.G.

© 2005 National Audubon Society

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