By The Light Of The Glow-worm Lamp

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