The Life and Legacies of a Polymath

摘要

Some biographies are for people who are secretly attracted by myths and sad to know that Hercules never existed. Nancy Slack's G. Evelyn Hutchinson and the Invention of Modern Ecology is surely for them. Hutchinson, my intellectual grandfather, was an intellectual Hercules, but he was flesh and blood through and through. And Slack (an ecologist and historian of science at the Sage Colleges) has labored long and hard, with admirable discipline and fine result, to crystallize his story for us. Slack begins with what she can reliably reconstruct of Hutchinson's childhood: He was born to an academic family living in Cambridge (the first one). There he was exposed to a veritable pantheon of intellectual deities but quickly became attracted to the world of nature. Slack portrays a Hutchinson whom I never knew before, and I am most grateful for the glimpse.