By The Light Of The Glow-worm Lamp - Softcover

Alberto Manguel, author of A History of Reading, is a wide-ranging reader, and this anthology is the product of years of browsing the shelves in adventure travel and natural history. It includes the usual suspects, among them Charles Darwin, Henry David Thoreau, Rachel Carson, and Annie Dillard--who are heavily represented in similar anthologies--but it also includes a few pleasant surprises, such as an essay by Maurice Maeterlinck on ants, Vladimir Nabokov's graceful reflections on lepidoptery, and Jean-Henri Fabre on wasps. The anthology would have benefited from editorial commentary and from a few more such surprises. As it is, though, it's a pleasant book to dip into, marked by Manguel's good taste. --Gregory McNamee

paper 0-306-45992-2 Manguel's (A History of Reading, 1996, etc.) collection of natural history essays is overburdened with selections from Victorian Englishmen, with a smattering of odd gems to sustain the reader's interest. Late 19th- and early 20th-century English writings on nature are known for their high coloration and elegiac tone, where nothing is left unsaid and the din of words can obscure the subject. That style evidently appeals to this editor. The anthologydivided into sections on landscape, birds, beasts, and on insects and fishbuzzes with the work of John Clare and Philip Henry Gosse, Richard Jeffries, Henry Seebohm, and Charles Darwin. Edmund Selouss tone is typical: ``If life is, as some hold it to be, a vast melancholy ocean over which ships more or less sorrow-laden continually pass and ply. . . .'' begins his essay on bird watching. If you push these gents to the side, though, a number of pleasures bob to the surface. They include Annie Dillard's meadow nightwatch (``I must have seen a thousand grasshoppers, alarums and excursions clicking over the clover, knee-high to me'') and Maurice Maeterlinck's wonderfully stuffy tribute to the pismire. We also overhear Vladimir Nabokov deciding whether or not it will be a good day for glimpsing butterflies. Then there are the 18th-century contrarian tweakings of Bedfordshire vicar Charles Abbot, for whom autumn ``is the one favorable time to realize how grand a color is a bright green.'' Mark Twain and D.H. Lawrence offer terrific, if not exactly unknown, landscape notes. Diane Ackerman elegantly reminds readers to get out and observe while the observing is still to be had. With a few fine exceptions, then, heres the nature essay at its most quaint and rhapsodic, from empurpled pens. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.