The Boilerplate Rhino

Title: The Boilerplate Rhino

 

Author: David Quammen

Publisher: Scribner (2000)

 

Genre(s): Non-Fiction, Essay

Length: 245 pages

Synopsis: Quammen spent fifteen years as a magazine columnist, writing "Natural Acts" for Outside.  Selections from the resulting essays, hundreds all told, have previously been collected and published in book form.  Now, twenty-five essays unpublished since their appearance in the magazine have been brought together in a new offering.  From beetles to black holes and rattlesnakes to rhinoceros, these essays explore nature in all its glorious facets.

My Rating: 3 Stars

My Opinion: Quammen is a skillful writer.  He's well trained and clearly knows what he's doing.  He's done the research and seems to be at least moderately interested in the subject matter.  What these essays lack is passion.  I don't mean to that to be a personal statement on Quammen's writing style.  I doubt the greatest writer in the history of language could write a nature column for fifteen years and have each and every essay ring with the kind of devotion that would leave readers starry-eyed with wonder.  Some of these do have a spark to them, though these tend to be the pieces that focus on writing or literature as much as nature.  The voice is sometimes distractingly cynical, and the essays occasionally seem to miss their target.  It's a difficult style-- these are not anecdotes; there's little to no narrative structure to bring the reader along.  Moreover, these pieces collected from a large body of work with no underlying thematic structure.  Though the pieces selected for this collection were grouped intentionally within the book, each is designed to be taken out of context and read without consideration of the pieces before and after.  Unfortunately, having been published together, it becomes difficult for a reader to separate them.  Some of these resonated with me more than others, but I found that those I didn't like as much seemed to dampen those that did.  It took me longer than normal to finish this book as I tried to space out the essays and gain perspective on them individually, but still, they lacked the kind of spark I've found in other nature writing and essays.  If Quammen were to research and write a full length book, I'd certainly like to read it, but I would recommend other essayists ahead of him.