Book Club: The Lying Stones of Marrakech...

I had to go back a read my book club about Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms to refresh my memory as to how I felt about Stephen Jay Gould's last collection of essays. As I thought, apparently I felt much the same about those than I did about his penultimate book collecting his essays from Natural History Magazine. The Lying Stones of Marrakech (LSoM; 2000; Harmony Books), like the previous 8 books in the series, features around 30 essays dealing with a variety of topics ostensibly within the overall umbrella concept of 'natural history'. I say 'ostensibly' however, because even more so than in the previous book, the essays contained herein begin to 'lose the plot'.

There are certainly interesting discoveries and concepts to be found in LSoM, but they tend to be presented in essays that are long-winded, rambling, and lacking in focus in comparison to the excellence that was Gould's earlier work. Almost every essay begins on a tangent so removed from the actual topic being discussed that I was left wondering how in the hell the author would bring the two together. Gould was certainly a talented writer that I admire very much, but he is no James Burke (at least not in field of story telling) and I often found the unification of the disparate threads of the narrative unsatisfying.

I read a rather mean spirited obituary for Gould a few years back in which the author accused him of quotational sophism - that is to say that Gould would quote classics for the sole purpose of sounding as 'high-falutin'' as possible. I have to admit that if the writer of said obituary was only familiar with the author's later works, I could see how he'd reached this conclusion. Gould ends pretty much every essay with a quote of dubious relevance - to the point where I'm not even sure what he was trying to say. I assume that his intent was to bring up random works of classic literature in order to bring them back into the limelight, perhaps intriguing a few people to go out and read them for themselves¹.

I just really don't know what to make of this collection. What I've appreciated about Gould's writing in the past was his ability to present complex topics in an interesting and enjoyable way. At this point in his career, it seems as though he shifted away from talking about the 'hard science' and became far more interested in science history, hermeneutics, and a mushy form of political advocacy that assumed that most people were firmly in the middle ground between extremes (Gould always maintained that the number of Americans that didn't believe in the theory of evolution was a small but vocal minority of the population - despite what some polls have suggested). Because of the frankly, unnecessary length of the essays, you kind-of have to work to get to the interesting bits, which is a shame, I think. There's only one last collection - the 10th volume - in the series that I've yet to read. I suppose that I will do so, even though my enthusiasm has been dampened. If the reviews on Amazon.com are any indication, Gould's verbose direction in essay writing continued right through to the end.


¹Although not really answering my question, in a previous book Gould did say that he liked to illustrate concepts using quotations from classic sources so that they would be timeless. The problem here is that the quotations often do a poor job of illustrating the points he's trying to make.