Wow.When I joined Goodreads a few months back, I set two rules for myself: first, to review books as I read or re-read them, and second, to be sparing with my ratings. I've not given any book five stars this summer. This is the first.Weiner won the Pulitzer for general non-fiction with this book in 1995. He utterly deserves it. While it's not difficult to find an interesting non-fiction book, and not too hard to find a truly gifted writer (the market's competitive like that), finding someone who...

This is not a bad book; it is OK. There is room for improvement.It is a book of the popular science genre. Having read them before, you know what is in-store.The book is about evolution, and so about Darwin, natural selection and survival of the fittest. Its central focus is a study of finches on Daphne Major, an island of the Galapagos archipelago. Ancestors of the finches studied were collected by Darwin on the HMS Beagle journey to the islands in September and October 1835. The study was led

I'm ashamed to say that I didn’t know until recently (after reading Dawkins’ magnificent book The Ancestor’s Tale) that evolution can in fact be observed happening in real time and not only in as short a time as centuries, but also in decades and even years. In that book, Dawkins spoke about Rosemary and Peter Grant in relation to their work on the Galapagos Islands on Darwin’s finches and how they showed the role of evolution in explaining the immense diversity of life. I tried to find a book o...

A woodpecker finch becomes possible only on an island without a woodpecker, a warbler finch only without a warbler. A flower-browsing finch becomes possible where there are no bees and hummingbirds—and on islands where bees have now invaded, many of Darwin’s finches have given back the flowers.The Beak of the Finch by Jonathan Weiner won the Pulitzer Prize for Non Fiction in 1995. This book gets high marks as an homage to Darwin. it follows a husband and wife’s two decade long biological survey

Thoughts soon.

"We are doing what the dinosaurs did before us, only faster.We bring strangers together to make strange bedfellows, and we remake the beds they lie in, all at once."

As Jonathan Weiner points out in this classic of science writing, the word "evolution" comes from the Latin word for unfolding, rolling out like a scroll.That's an appropriate concept for this book, which unfurls before the reader an impressive array of late-20th-century scientific research into natural selection, sexual selection and speciation – all of it hammering home again and again: Not only was Darwin right, he was righter than he knew.As the book's title implies, Weiner focuses on Darwin...

This was a really interesting look into the constant evolution of finches in the Galapagos. Parts of it were a little slow (and I definitely got bogged down by the constant repetition of "beak" and "finch," though that probably couldn't be helped, given the subject), but other parts were very interesting. The writing was also very good. My least favorite part was the last few chapters when the author got away from finches and switched to humans. I can see why he would do it because it's interest...

A cripplingly tedious account of cripplingly tedious field work that tends to confirm things that you thought were totally obvious. For most people with a high school education, natural selection, at the level depicted in the book, is pure common sense. Environmental pressures favor the survival/fecundity of certain phenotypes that then tend to displace others. Sexual preference, adaptive behaviors, and cross-breeding affect this in several ways and, if the pressures are extreme, the changes can...

The finches of the Galapogos Islands rank right up there with Newton's apple and Galileo's telescope in the iconography of science, and like them, are as much fiction now as fact. There is a great deal of accumulated storytelling around the nugget of truth about Darwin's finches. While they did influence Darwin's thinking, they were just one of many, many species (or groups of species) to do so, and his notes do not reveal them to have been any sort of trigger for a Eureka moment. To give just o...

In 1973 Rosemary and Peter Grant went to the Galapagos Islands to take a look at Darwin's finches. The two Princeton evolutionary biologists went to study the finches at first hand on Daphne Major, an even more isolated island in the middle of the Archipelago. These famous finches are the ones that Charles Darwin encountered during his voyage on the HMS Beagle and which inspired his ideas on evolution. The Grants went to see if they could observe evolution in action as they felt that even Darwin...

The Beak of the Finch is an excellent introduction to contemporary evolutionary theory. There was quite a lot of detail about studies into the Galapagos finches, which was great! The finches & how quickly they are evolving is super interesting. I also have a new found appreciation for the lengths that ecologists go to for their field work. I think that this book struck a nice balance between hard science, human interest, history and philosophy. It is nice to learn a bit about the scientists' liv...

nice little film to go with this book....https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcM23...

I am somewhat reluctantly giving this highly entertaining book four stars. I never took any science courses at university and my high school studies are fifty years behind me so I have no idea how good a job it does at explaining the state of evolutionary studies at the end of the 20th century which is the nominal purpose of the book.The book however is a delight to read as Weiner tells with great flair the story of two Princeton biologists Pieter and Rosemary Grant as they studied the finch pop...

This would be on my short list of best science books. Thrilling fieldwork. Especially poignant this month that we commemorate the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth, and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his “The Origin of the Species.” Weiner’s book details the study of Darwin’s finches by Princeton evolutionary biologists: Peter and Rosemary Grant. The Grants monitored every single finch on the island of Daphne Major in the Galápagos Islands over more than two decades. They

Good book. I found just about every chapter interesting, but my attention would wane by the end of each chapter. Once I got the gist of the chapter’s content, the second and third examples were oftentimes unnecessary. Well structured and well written. I can see why it won a Pulitzer.

I will happily read an extremely detailed account of tedious biological studies without such enchanting prose, but I suppose I can't complain. I could do without the last few chapters on antibiotic resistance, global warming, and the effect of humanity on the environment, however - perhaps in 1994 these topics were not yet legally required to be covered in every remotely related book, but by now I have no need of reading these same stories in addition to the delightfully informative details of a...

A description of evolution research and results mostly in the Galapagos Island and mostly on the famous "Darwin Finches" with references to the research that Darwin himself conducted and the (wrong and right) conclusions that he came to.It seems that I have read so many books about Darwin's "On the Origin of Species" and so many books that refer to "On the Origin of Species" that it is about time I read "On the Origin of Species"…… To some extent, it is like the Bible, I prefer to read reference...

Extraordinary. This work expands upon the two biographies I read recently about Charles Darwin and evolution. Weiner is a fantastic writer. He takes a science subject and makes it understandable and then at the end of science-sections he inserts beautiful almost poetic prose that makes you sigh. The setting is a tiny island called Daphne Major in the Galapago Islands, and the work is about a 21 year finch study conducted by Rosemary and Peter Grant. The Grants have proven that evolution can happ...

The single best non-academic, book-length riposte to doubters of natural selection. Brilliant and accessible to readers without any special scientific background, patient and uncondescending toward creationists (though firmly dismissing creationist claims), it made for the perfect accompaniment to my recent Galapagos island trip. You will also learn more about — and enjoy learning more about — finches, and El Niños, and the Humboldt current, and Darwinian angst than you ever thought possible.

Lots of people I know rave about this book, but my feeling was…. Zzzzzzzz (snore). Unless you are an avid bird-enthusiast, this book feels very repetitive, and overly complimentary to the Grants, almost as if it were an advertisement for their work. They are wonderful people (I met them recently when they came to my university to give a talk) but if Jonathon Weiner spent so much time with them, didn’t he observe anything less flattering? That would have made them seem more normal and less saintl...

This book is really important. The study of how micro-evolution happens from one year to the next to the next in the Galapagos gave me a lot of insight into how the environment shapes species. Traits are constantly changing, yet the graph jitters back and forth around some more-or-less average value. It's really not average, though, because climate, rainfall, etc. are all fundamentally chaotic systems. Organisms tend to track generation by generation the conditions as they fall out. Over geologi...

This is a remarkable book, aiming primarily to correct the misconception that evolution is too slow a process to be witnessed in any living person's lifetime, so slow that it can for all practical purposes be considered to have stopped. Buttressing this misconception is the observation that no person, living or dead, has observed the emergence of any new species. Jonathan Weiner corrects this misconception by pointing to several long-running field observation studies that have documented dramati...

It took me awhile to read this, simply because I was working a ton in June and this is not a reflection on the book. I loved this - it was mind blowing, eye opening, engaging, and informative. I would like to go read everything Peter & Rosemary Grant have ever written, and also go read Origin of the Species (again). The complex interactions that rule the world and the Galapagos were explained in detail and examples, which I found to be really helpful. I really enjoyed reading about the boom/bust...

Though it's 25 years old by now (showing its age a bit with discussions of 90s technology), this book was a fascinating look at a married couple of scientists who studied "Darwin's finches" for twenty years, documenting natural selection at work in a way that no one had been able to do before. It also looked at Darwin's writings and ideas in general, including how he came to his conclusions and what he simply didn't have the tools to know during his time. It was a neat glimpse at the rigor of sc...

I had briefly heard of that book before, and had a mental image of it that didn't quite fit reality. I thought the book would solely focus on the work of Peter and Rosemary Grant, but a lot of it is also digging into Charles Darwin's books to explain how the theory of evolution started, how it actually works, and how we can observe it in action within a few years, or even within months.The book is beautifully written and gives a specialist's topic (the biology of finches in the Galapagos) an adv...

This is a masterpiece of accessible science writing. Oftentimes, scientific people don't understand just how dumb non-scientific people are, but Jonathan Weiner does. Without being condescending, he explains why evolution is accessible knowledge and important to understand. Loosely following the decades-long study of Galapagos finches by Peter and Rosemary Grant, this book explains evolution in real time with the help of real people. I've always been frustrated by some of the gaps in evolutionar...

This book started off interesting for me, but I got less enthused by about the midway point. The central point of the book is that evolution can happen much faster than Darwin ever thought. Weiner profiles the Grants, two esteemed biologists who spent their entire careers studying the Galapagos finches in incredible depth. A few big insights emerged that I thought were interesting. In a dry year, finches with big beaks survived with the advantage of being able to crack large nuts in a time of sc...

Let's start here: Someone really should invent a new word. Evolution, like gravity, is fact. It's far beyond theory status, as most people seem to use and understand the word. And dammit; it's not something you "believe" in (that would be like saying you believe in dirt). If you refuse to see that, you have an issue. You are somehow invested in believing something patently untrue. Why could that be?Dunno...it is completely baffling to me.This book ranks with McCullough's John Adams and Shirer's

3.5 stars. Really interesting and very well narrated, but I will admit I got reeeally sick of hearing, "natural selection scrutinizes daily and hourly..." First of all, natural selection is not a dude with a magnifying glass. And second of all, soooooo repetitious! He said it about seven or eight times in the first fourth or so of the book. Too much! Finally on the third time, he at least added "metaphorically," which made me feel a little better. But still. It annoyed me.Other that that, it's a...