Gould is one of the most spirited essayists of our time. He can work himself into a corkscrew of ideas and improbable allusions paragraph after paragraph and then, uncoiling, hit with such power that his fans know they are experiencing the game of essay writing at its best.
The New York Times Book Review
There is a lot of compulsive reading here. Hard-hitting exposures of muddled thinking about matters biological and other serious issues that we would all do well to take aboard. He proves that biological scientists can be entertaining as well as useful, and succeeds in educating us in spite of ourselves.
New Scientist
His collections of essays are discontinuous but, as in a pointillist painting, the individual elements eventually provide a picture of enormous dimensions. In this current collection, Gould discusses the duck-billed platypus, male nipples, the clitoris, Franz Anton Mesmer and the odd dinosaur. Gould's point is that evolution is not a ladder but a bush; ever dividing, branching and making twigs.
The Times
He fossicks through history, here and there picking up a bone, an imprint, a fossil dropping and, from these, tries to reconstruct the past afresh in all its messy ambiguity. It's the droppings that provide the freshness: he's as likely to quote from Mark Twain or Joe DiMaggio as from Lamarck or Lavoisier.
Guardian
Professor Gould has triumphantly reached out from the ivory tower to show to every reader that the diversity of life on this planet can be both fascinating and entertaining.
Independent
Stephen Jay Gould grew up in New York City. He graduated from Antioch College and received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1967. Since then he has been Professor of Geology and Zoology at Harvard University. He considers himself primarily a palaeontologist and an evolutionary biologist, though he teaches geology and history of science as well.