Chasing Kangaroos
A Continent, a Scientist, and a Search for the World's Most Extraordinary Creature
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- $2.99
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- $2.99
Publisher Description
The internationally acclaimed author of The Weather Makers crafts a love letter to his native land and one of its most unique inhabitants: the kangaroo.
Drawing on three decades of travel, research, and field work, Tim Flannery shows us how the destiny of the extraordinary kangaroo is inseparable from the environment that created it. Along the way he uses encounters with ancient aboriginal cultures, eccentric fossil hunters, farmers, scientists, kangaroo advocates, and kangaroo hunters, to explore how Australia’s deserts and rain forests have shaped human responses to the continent—and how kangaroos have evolved to handle the resulting challenges. Ultimately, Chasing Kangaroos is a captivating blend of memoir, travel, natural history, and evolutionary science—and further proof of Flannery’s “offhand interdisciplinary brilliance” (Entertainment Weekly).
“Absorbing, funny, and wonderfully learned.” —Bill Bryson, New York Times–bestselling author of A Walk in the Woods
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This paean to a remarkable animal by Flannery, author of the well-received global warming treatise The Weather Makers, is fascinating but scattershot. The kangaroo, the only large animal that hops, can travel at speeds of 15 40 kilometers per hour. Female kangaroos, who carry their young in pouches, have two vaginas, but don't give birth through either of them, and are always pregnant, because they mate a few hours after their young are born. There are 70-odd species of kangaroo: some drink salt water; others live in trees. But as a paleontologist, Flannery is obsessed with finding out when and where the first kangaroos lived. Much of the book is about his searches for the fossils of extinct species in remote areas of the Australian outback, where he discovered the remains of "the grandfather of all kangaroos," as well as the fossils of ice age giants, such as the short-faced kangaroo and a carnivorous kangaroo. The accounts of his discoveries are engaging, but he covers too much ground, switching back and forth between physical descriptions, kangaroo evolution, reminiscences of his fossil hunting travels, worries about Australia's environment and the aborigines, and his controversial extinction theories. B&w and color illus. not seen by PW.
