Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin; The Richness of Life: The Essential Stephen Jay Gould (inscribed to Oliver Sacks)
NY: Harmony Books, 1996. First edition. Hardcover.
Two books: The first, in wraps, an advanced uncorrected proof of Stephen Jay Gould’s Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin. Inscribed to Oliver Sacks on the title page: “For Oliver, with best wishes & admiration, Steve, Stephen Jay Gould.” Full House “explodes our misconceptions about the nature of progress, the nature of excellence, and the nature of nature,” reexamining trends that are seen as progress or anti-progress and often flipping them on their head. As evidence it examines everything from baseball to natural history. It’s a hybrid work of science and iconoclastic intellectualism that showcases Gould’s rare ability to write across disciplines, with erudition and expertise, for a general audience though his scientific research was in evolutionary biology (specifically snails). A very good or better copy with trace edge wear, toning to pages, and a few smudges to cover (which may wipe off), along with a “granny smith” apple sticker stuck to the front wrap at lower left (a cool addition, we think).
Together with The Richness of Life: The Essential Stephen Jay Gould. NY: WW Norton, 2006. A posthumous collection edited by biologist Stephen Rose and with a foreword by Oliver Sacks. This copy is also from the library of Oliver Sacks, his complimentary copy from the publisher. With a handsome bookseller’s bookplate marking the book as from Sacks’s library. As the jacket describes, “This magnificent collection ranges across the spectrum of Gould’s writing, including his most famous essays and selections from all his major books, as well as gemlike speeches and articles that thrilled and instructed a generation … it is a feast.” With a blurb from Oliver Sacks as well on the rear cover that may directly refer to the arguments in Full House: “No one has written of our illusions about progress in nature with more wit and learning than Stephen Jay Gould.” 650 pages. A fine book in near fine jacket with a light vertical streak of rubbing on the rear panel from the underlying board.
As the foreword to The Richness of Life in part describes, Stephen Jay Gould and Oliver Sacks became good friends in the 90s after Sacks publicly praised Gould’s book Wonderful Life and they struck up a correspondence. They met in person in 1992 during the filming of a documentary called A Glorious Accident, wherein six brilliant minds were brought together as if around a dinner table for fierce conversation. Interviewed at first separately on that occasion, they both said that, though they had not met one another, they thought of each other as “a brother.” “When we did finally meet, shortly after this,” writes Sacks in the foreword to The Richness of Life, “our sense of brotherhood was confirmed, and in the years that followed we shared a sort of kinship of intellectual approach and voice, and perhaps a common passion for the variety of life.” In 1996 Gould moved half-time to the West Village where Sacks also lived, and he and Sacks spent much time together walking and dining out and touring the city. Gould regularly hosted birthday parties for Sacks and wrote doggerel poems for the occasion. They shared work, too: Sacks remembers he would often immediately write Gould at length with his thoughts after reading his latest addition to his longtime (25 year) column in Natural History (and upon Goulds’ death, he took over the column). Gould returned the favor in like ways. “As a friend and colleague,” writes Sacks, “he was extraordinarily generous, sometimes sending me pages of detailed notes on a new manuscript of mine, and many of us relied on his forthrightness of taste.” They were both insatiably curious, equally polymaths who were at the top of their fields but interested and conversant in so many others. For more on their friendship, see this eighteen-minute eloquent interview (via YouTube) with Sacks on his friendship with Gould.
More about them individually: Stephen Jay Gould is considered one of the most influential popular scientist writers of the 20th century. An evolutionary biologist, in his field he’s known especially for his theory of “punctuated equilibrium,” which holds that evolution operates through times of rapid, extreme change (e.g. the Anthropocene) followed by relative stability. He argued forcefully against creationism, describing religion and science as separate fields with different emphases and equal merits. He also was against sociobiology and had a longstanding debate with his Harvard colleague E.O. Wilson—perhaps the only contemporary science writer of his stature—warning against a “deterministic view of human society and human action.” He was the winner of the National Book Award in science in 1981 for The Panda’s Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History and a finalist for the same award the following year for The Mismeasure of Man, which did win the National Book Critics Circle Award. He died at 60 of cancer in 2002.
Oliver Sacks was a British neurologist that the New York Times dubbed “the poet laureate of contemporary medicine.” He spent the bulk of his medical career as a professor of neurology at Yeshiva University’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine. There he began to write about some of his neurology patients (he burned the manuscript of his first book, Ward 23, in a fit of anxiety about his new direction). He went on to publish fourteen books from 1970 to 2015, the year he died also of cancer, most of them with a focus on highly researched clinical anecdotes, including such lauded works as The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (the main case study of which is a man with “face blindness,” something Sacks also suffered from, and which deeply impacted his social interactions) and The Island of the Colorblind.
A remarkable friendship among two of the premier science writers of our times, and a pair of books sure to be a standout inclusion in any collection
ISBN: 9780517703946
Price: $2,250.00 save 5% $2,137.50