Charles Waterton 1782-1865

Oct 8, 2024 3:25 PM

Author:Julia Blackburn

Charles Waterton was the first conservationist who fought to protect wild nature against the destruction and pollution of Victorian industrialisation. During his lifetime he was famous for his eccentricities, but also for his achievements and his opinions. A Yorkshire landowner, he turned his park into a sanctuary for animals and birds. As an explorer he learned to survive in the tropical rain forests of South America without a gun or the society of other white men. He was an authority on the poisons used by South American Indians and a taxidermist of note. The huge public that read his books included Dickens, Darwin and Roosevelt. Since his death the memory of Waterton's personal eccenticities has flourished, while the originality of his ideas and work has often suffered. Using his surviving papers, Julia Blackburn has redressed the balance in a biogr aphy that restores Waterton to his place as the first conservationist of the modern age.

Reviews

Julia Blackburn is an astute and gifted biographer...Her style is economical, and where appropriate graceful; always lucid, sometimes poetic, never gushing...Her book will intrigue and enthral

—— Spectator

Science needs more people like Penrose, willing and able to point out the flaws in fashionable models from a position of authority, and to signpost alternative roads to follow

—— Independent

A genuinely new idea about the origins of the universe that, although untested, seems to hold together theoretically and must be taken seriously given Penrose's status

—— Doug Johnstone , Scotsman

Cycles of Time can be highly recommended as an example of how cosmologists are now thinking the unthinkable by trying to look back beyond the Big Bang and forward beyond the death of our universe

—— Literary Review

Cycles of Time is as uncondescending in style and as impenetrable in content as his previous books. Which is not to say that there are not, as before, many pleasures to be had along the way

—— Sunday Times

Doing what most find impossible has long been Penrose's stock-in-trade in mathematics and physics... Destined to be another bestseller

—— Guardian

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