I was very pleased to be surprised by the package in the mail from Chelsea Green Publishing containing this book and a note asking me to review it.
“When Margulis passed away in 2011, she left behind a groundbreaking scientific legacy that spanned decades. In this collection, Dorion Sagan, Margulis’ son and longtime collaborator, gathers together the voices of friends and colleagues to remark on her life and legacy, in essays that cover her early collaboration with James Lovelock, her fearless face-off with Richard Dawkins during the so-called “Battle of Balliol” at Oxford, the intrepid application of her scientific mind to the insistence that 9/11 was a false-flag operation, her affinity for Emily Dickinson, and more”If you know about Margulis’ work you still need to read this book because it is a multifaceted view of this magnificent person and her ideas and puts her wok into a context that enriches our understanding. I venture to guess that, if you are like me, you might have thought you knew about it and will be amazed to find how little of its totality you actually had a hold of.“Margulis was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1983, received the prestigious National Medal of Science in 1999, and her papers are permanently archived at the Library of Congress. Less than a month before her untimely death, Margulis was named one of the twenty most influential scientists alive— one of only two women on this list, which include such scientists as Stephen Hawking, James Watson, and Jane Goodall.”
“Lynn Margulis was a scientist whose intellectual energy and interests knew no bounds. Best known for her work on the origins of eukaryotic cells, the Gaia hypothesis, and symbiogenesis as a driving force in evolution, her work has forever changed the way we understand life on Earth.”
I write this review at very special time for me for the book Jim Coffman and I wrote together (Global Insanity: How Homo sapiens Lost Touch with Reality while Transforming the World, being published by Emergent Publications) is being set in type as I write this and we expect to see the proofs any day now. The two books are related in many ways even though they are very different as well. Read on below the break and I'll try to give you a glimpse at this splendid memorial work.