The Boilerplate Rhino
David Quammen
287 pages, including index
published in 2000

Sandra got this from the Amsterdam library and when I looked it over (as one does), my eye fell on the sentence "No doubt you've often asked yourself, over the years, why it is that owls don't have penises". Needless to say, this sold me on the book. I like non-fiction writers with a sense of humour.

The Boilerplate Rhino is a collection of columns David Quammen wrote for Outside magazine, one of those outdoors sports and hiking rags. For fifteen years he got to write a monthly column on science and the natural world and this book presents a selection of them. In the introduction Quammen sketches why he assembled this collection: to create abook that "reflects the range and trajectory of notions explored over time by one columnist for one set of readers". He succeeded reasonably well.

Because these pieces appeared in a outdoors sports magazine rather than in Scientific American or something similar, they naturally have to appeal to a lay audience. His columns are no rigorous scientific treatises, nor expect a second Stephen Jay Gould. David Quammen is not a biologist, he is a writer interested in the natural world. For a layman like me, this is no great handicap. He writes engagingly enough about subjects interesting enough without a deep scientific analysis.

Apart from owls penises, he also writes about e.g. what exactly eggs are, why certain people are afraid of spiders or snakes while some really, really like them and how Albrecht Durer drew a remarkebly good likeness of a rhinocerus even though he had only secondhand information about it. He is, in other words, quite wide ranging in scope. This helps in keeping the collection interesting. These sort of collections usually work bettr if you dip into them every now and again rather than read straight through, but in this case it did not matter much. The Boilerplate Rhino kept my attention from the first to the last page. It is recommended to anyone who likes to read interesting stories about the natural world at not too great a depth.