Armand Marie Leroi is a professor of evolutionary developmental biology at Imperial College London. He is also a broadcaster and the author of Mutants: On Genetic Variety and the Human Body, which has been translated into nine languages and won the Guardian First Book Award. He lives in London.
Praise for The Lagoon
“For several years in his middle age, Aristotle lived on the island
of Lesbos, where he studied the creatures in an inland sea known as
Kolpos Kalloni. It was here, Leroi argues in this vivid travelogue
and scientific history, that the philosopher pioneered a method of
thinking about the natural world that amounted to the invention of
science. Breaking with the speculative theories of his naturalist
predecessors, Aristotle insisted on rooting claims about the
purposes and causes of living beings in observation. The vast
catalogues that resulted from his work are messy and filled with
unassimilated data, but, as Leroi, a biologist, demonstrates, their
basic methodology has filtered down through the ages.”
—The New Yorker
“Armand Marie Leroi’s reappraisal of [Aristotle], The Lagoon, is
one of the most inspired and inspiring I have read . . . Leroi’s
ambitious aim is to return Aristotle to the pantheon of biology’s
greats, alongside Charles Darwin and Carl Linnaeus. He has achieved
it.”
—Nature
“The Lagoon is an intellectual homage—an admiring, deeply
researched and considered reconstruction of Aristotle’s thinking
about living things . . . marvelous . . . a work as important to a
historian and philosopher of science as it is informative to a
biologist and entertaining to the general reader. As compelling as
Stephen Jay Gould’s best work, it will long outlast most nature
writing of recent years.”
—New Scientist
“A fascinating new book . . . Leroi argues that Aristotle developed
many of the empirical and analytical methods that still define
scientific inquiry . . . . Leroi is a brilliant guide to the
history of science. He traces the history of ideas with skill and
care, and he avoids the smug certainty of many contemporary science
writers.”
—The Daily Beast
“A remarkable recovery of an ancient thinker’s daringly original
enterprises—and mind-set.”
—Booklist (Starred Review)
“Leroi calls on his expertise and his experience as a BBC science
presenter to explain why Aristotle’s writings on science are still
relevant today . . . A wide-ranging, delightful tour de force.”
—Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)
“Leroi lovingly rescues the reputation of Aristotle’s alternately
meticulous and bizarre studies of animal behavior from the ruins
left in the wake of derision during the Scientific Revolution.
Leroi brings modern sensibility to, yet evokes an air of
timelessness with, his gorgeous descriptions.”
—Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
“Leroi clearly adores Greece and he uses his detailed local
knowledge to splendid effect, evocatively re-creating the
experiences of the peripatetic philosopher . Leroi is absolutely
right to say that even those sections of Aristotle’s work we no
longer believe to be correct have affected the knowledge that we
have today.”
—Literary Review
“In this lush, epic and hugely enjoyable book, biologist Armand
Marie Leroi explores the idea that it was another ancient Greek
giant whose shoulders we may all stand upon. Leroi is a beautiful
writer and it’s been too long, a decade, since his last outstanding
book.”
—Observer
“Brilliant. Not just a charismatic book, but one that places
Aristotle in a freshly Aegean context. Above all, Leroi shows,
science today trawls through reams of data for patterns and
explanations, in precisely Aristotle's manner.”
—Sunday Times
“Leroi takes us through Aristotle’s work, finding hints of modern
thinking everywhere. The Lagoon bubbles with enthusiasm for its
subject, making an absolutely gripping read out of what might have
seemed the most unlikely material.”
—The Times (London)
“Compelling, sometimes contentious, and always thought-provoking.
It celebrates what is most admirable in the Aristotelian tradition:
its appreciation of what is actually there.”
—Financial Times
“How Aristotle nearly beat Darwin to a theory of evolution.
Brilliant.”
—Sunday Times Must Reads
“Whether Aristotle is exploring the meaning of existence, the
structure of the human heart or the souls of cuttlefish, Leroi is
an enthralling and irreverent guide to ‘the first scientist’.”
—Independent
“A look at some of the great Greek’s most startling, yet often
overlooked, ideas.”
—Observer
“Magnificent . . . . This book is powerful, graceful and charming.
Leroi’s prose is as blue-white bright as an Aegean sky reflected
from a whitewashed wall. . . beautifully designed and deftly
illustrated.”
—Guardian
“Leroi says that Aristotle’s writing is a ‘naturalist’s joy’; the
same can be said for Mr. Leroi’s . I admire this entertaining,
insightful and felicitously written book.”
—International New York Times
“Scintillatingly argued.”
—James McConnachie, Spectator Books of the Year
“Leroi reconstructs Aristotle’s studies of wildlife at the Kalloni
lagoon on Lesbos more than 2,300 years ago. Entertainingly, he
builds up the thesis that the great Greek philosopher was the
world’s first systematic biologist.”
—Financial Times Books of the Year
“In the History of Animals, [Aristotle] speaks of the
reproduction of lice, the mating habits of herons, the sexual
incontinence of girls, the stomachs of snails, the sensitivity of
starfish, the dumbness of the deaf, the flatulence of elephants and
the structure of the human heart: his book contains 130,000 words
and 9,000 empirical claims’. Leroi’s own uncompromising
investigation gives us a flavour of his subject’s indefatigable
explorations. Leroi does not upstage Aristotle’s descriptions with
modern anatomical illustrations, though his attractively
illustrated discussions draw on much scholarship that has been
expended on editing and interpreting Aristotle’s ideas about
nature. Leroi’s scholarship is impeccable and consistently
generous. Only an expert biologist with broad cultural sympathies
and a deep feeling for history could have created such a compelling
reappraisal of Aristotle’s place in the history of science. What’s
in a name, indeed; in marshalling the facts and ideas that support
Aristotle’s scientific credentials in exuberant detail, Leroi must
be accounted the king.”
—Times Literary Supplement
“Armand Marie Leroi opens Aristotle’s classical cabinet of
curiosities to discover the genesis of science inside. In elegant,
stylish and often witty prose, he probes the near-legendary, almost
primeval lagoon, which inspired the ancient Greek’s Historia
Animalium and animates it anew with his own incisive observations.
From snoring dolphins to divine bees, Leroi shows us how Aristotle
invented taxonomy two and a half millennia before Linnaeus. That,
in fact, out of poetry and metaphysics, blending the mythic with
the mundane, Aristotle foresaw our contemporary dilemmas of
definition and description. The Lagoon is a heroic, beautiful work
in its own right, an inquiring odyssey into unknown nature and the
known world, which science has created out of it.”
—Philip Hoare, author of Leviathan, or The Whale
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