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qofdnz's review against another edition
3.0
I'm not sure what it was I just read and I never thought I would be mesmerized by ants. Just found the rather rushed ending a bit random.
sohnesorge's review against another edition
I had to give up on this one half-way through. It's not that it's a BAD book, it's just that I don't care enough about ants.
barry_sweezey's review against another edition
Such an eminent scientist has no business being such an evocative novelist. In part of the book, he tells the story of some ant colonies from the ants' point of view.
glabeson's review against another edition
2.0
Wanted to like his prose...didn't capture me in the first 50pp--gave up.
jmorr290's review against another edition
2.0
The best part was the "ant chronicles". Who knew ants could be so fascinating.
The rest of it fell flat.
The rest of it fell flat.
lizdesole's review against another edition
4.0
There were three parts to this novel.
The first is the story of a boy growing up in the south
I liked but didn't love this part. Partly because the story was interesting but the characters never really gelled for me
The second part of the book is an anthropomorphized account of the ant colonies in the woods near the protagonist's home. This part was absolutely fascinating. No surprise considering the fact that the author is a renowned biologist.
The third part is the protagonist trying to save his little part of the world. It was ok, but I still didn't feel the characters were that believable. The ending felt like a tacked-on chase scene from a movie though.
He should write more about creeping things-forget about the humans
The first is the story of a boy growing up in the south
I liked but didn't love this part. Partly because the story was interesting but the characters never really gelled for me
The second part of the book is an anthropomorphized account of the ant colonies in the woods near the protagonist's home. This part was absolutely fascinating. No surprise considering the fact that the author is a renowned biologist.
The third part is the protagonist trying to save his little part of the world. It was ok, but I still didn't feel the characters were that believable. The ending felt like a tacked-on chase scene from a movie though.
He should write more about creeping things-forget about the humans
psteve's review against another edition
3.0
I wanted to like this book better than I did and certainly the author's heart is in the right place. The book is divided into thirds; the first tells the story of a young man developing an interest in biology, the second tells the story of a year in the life of a group of anthills, and the third talks about a kid interested in biology who becomes and eco activist and lawyer. The part about the anthill is the most interesting, as Wilson knows more about ants than most anyone, and he really makes us understand how the colony works. The other parts are good, and the characters well drawn (particularly, I think, for a scientist out of his realm), but somehow they didn't move me like they should. Still, I remember the characters and suspect they'll live in memory.
davidr's review against another edition
4.0
So, how can a novel also be a book about science, biology, and environmentalism? Edward O. Wilson, eminent biologist, researcher, environmentalist, and Pulitzer-Prize-winning author has managed. This is a coming-of-age story about a boy named Raff, who grows up in southern Alabama, at the edge of a piece of wilderness known as the Nokobee tract. He grows up loving this wilderness area, and visits frequently, studying the plants and wildlife that thrive there. His relatives don't quite understand the fascination he feels for the region, but tolerate his interests and activities.
The middle section of the book is unlike any novel I've ever read. It is titled "The Anthill Chronicles", and gives a detailed history of the ant colonies in the region, totally from the ants' point of view. Wilson is an expert on ants, and this section is supposed to be a summary of Raff's first-hand research. It is a memorable history, that shows how ant society is eerily reminiscent of human society; workers, soldiers, celebrities, scouts, carrying on the business of the anthill; gathering food, competitions for status, and fighting wars. The parallels with humans are not explicitly pointed out, but they are remarkable.
It's interesting that many of the characters' actions in the story are explained from a naturalist's point of view. They are "pre-ordained" by their genetic programming, and free will is not really an option. The writing style is just a tad stilted, and the story is a bit pollyanish up until the last few chapters. But I enjoyed the book, not only for the descriptions of nature, but also for the insights into the Southern characters and their class-conscious lives. In a vivid monologue, Raff's father tells his son all about his philosophy and code of ethics, and how he expects his son to act. His code is that of a Southern gentleman, and he sums it up:
The middle section of the book is unlike any novel I've ever read. It is titled "The Anthill Chronicles", and gives a detailed history of the ant colonies in the region, totally from the ants' point of view. Wilson is an expert on ants, and this section is supposed to be a summary of Raff's first-hand research. It is a memorable history, that shows how ant society is eerily reminiscent of human society; workers, soldiers, celebrities, scouts, carrying on the business of the anthill; gathering food, competitions for status, and fighting wars. The parallels with humans are not explicitly pointed out, but they are remarkable.
Spoiler
In the third section of the book, Raff does something totally inexplicable to those who know him well. He becomes a lawyer, and gets hired as a legal counsel to a development company that wants to buy up the Nokobee tract, and replace the wilderness with condos and strip malls. Raff has a secret plan, but keeps it secret from everyone.It's interesting that many of the characters' actions in the story are explained from a naturalist's point of view. They are "pre-ordained" by their genetic programming, and free will is not really an option. The writing style is just a tad stilted, and the story is a bit pollyanish up until the last few chapters. But I enjoyed the book, not only for the descriptions of nature, but also for the insights into the Southern characters and their class-conscious lives. In a vivid monologue, Raff's father tells his son all about his philosophy and code of ethics, and how he expects his son to act. His code is that of a Southern gentleman, and he sums it up:
Never lie or cheat. Never ever hit a woman. Never hit a smaller man, if you can keep from doing it, Raff. Never hit anyone first, but never back down when you know you're in the right.
borislimpopo's review against another edition
3.0
Wilson, Edward O. (2010). Anthill: A Novel. New York: W. W. Norton & Co. 2010.
E. O. Wilson è (stato) un autore molto controverso. Quando, nel 1975, pubblicò Sociobiology. The New Synthesis gli diedero addosso un po’ tutti: la destra religiosa (americana) che vedeva nella sociobiologia il potenziale di trasformarsi in una mitologia del materialismo scientistico, ma anche i progressisti che aderivamo al “modello standard delle scienze sociali”, secondo il quale i comportamenti umani sono culturalmente (e non geneticamente) acquisiti. La stessa comunità scientifica, specialmente una parte del “campo darwiniano”, con Stephen Jay Gould e Richard Lewontin in testa, contestò vivacemente le sue idee. Che adesso, a 35 anni di distanza, sono accettate abbastanza pacificamente. Ma all’epoca Wilson fu accusato di essere razzista e misogino, e a favore dell’eugenetica. Nel novembre del 1978, a una conferenza dell’AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science, di cui mi onoro di essere un membro) un collega gli versò in testa una brocca d’acqua. Wilson si vantò poi di essere stato l’unico scienziato in epoca moderna a essere stato aggredito per un’idea.
A vederlo adesso, ultraottantenne (questa foto è di un paio di anni, quando Wilson aveva per l’appunto appena compiuto 80 anni) non lo si direbbe uomo capace di scatenare polemiche così accese.
Wilson ha anche vinto due premi Pulitzer, il primo nel 1979 per On Human Nature, il secondo nel 1991 per The Ants (scritto con Bert Hölldobler). Profondamente innamorato del suo lavoro e aiutato da una grande capacità di raccontare in termini chiari e rigorosi, Wilson è anche un grande “divulgatore” (abbiamo giù parlato qui del diverso approccio, e della diversa terminologia, con cui nel mondo anglosassone si affronta il tema della popular science): proprio per questo nel 1994 è stato insignito di un altro premio, il Carl Sagan Award for Public Understanding of Science.
Con questo curriculum non mi sembra sorprendente che Wilson abbia voluto cimentarsi con la narrativa. Anzi, forse lo è piuttosto il fatto che abbia atteso la tarda età per farlo. I motivi di questa scelta, forse, è meglio lasciarli esporre allo stesso Wilson, nel Prologo del romanzo:
THIS IS A STORY about three parallel worlds, which nevertheless exist in the same space and time. They rise together, they fall, they rise again, but in cycles so different in magnitude that each is virtually invisible to the others.
The smallest are the ants, who build civilizations in the dirt. Their histories are epics that unfold on picnic grounds. Their colonies, like those of humans, are in perpetual conflict. War is a genetic imperative of most. The colonies grow and struggle and sometimes they triumph over their neighbors. Then they die, always.
Human societies are the second world. There are of course vast differences between ants and men. But in fundamental ways their cycles are similar. There is something genetic about this convergence. Because of it, ants are a metaphor for us, and we for them. Homer might have written equally of ants and men, Zeus has given us the fate of winding down our lives in painful wars, from youth until we perish, each of us.
Thousands of times greater in space and time is the third of our worlds, the biosphere, the totality of all life, plastered like a membrane over all of earth. The biosphere has its own epic cycles. Humanity, one of the countless species forming the biosphere, can perturb it, but we cannot leave it or destroy it without perishing ourselves. The cycles of the other species can be destroyed, and the biosphere corrupted. But for each careless step we take, our species will ultimately pay an unwelcome price—always. [139 – sono costretto come di consueto a citare la posizione sul Kindle]
Il problema, secondo me, è che scrivere un saggio scientifico (ancorché “divulgativo”) e scrivere un romanzo sono due cose molto diverse. Se dovessi giudicare Anthill secondo il metro critico con cui giudico abitualmente i romanzi dovrei dire che questo non è poi un granché. Soprattutto perché mi sembra che spesso l’autore si faccia prendere da un intento didattico-moralistico (ne potete cogliere le tracce già nel Prologo appena citato) che proprio non dovrebbero mai trasparire in un romanzo riuscito. E tuttavia, al termine della recensione, riprodurrò – come faccio sempre – alcuni passaggi che mi hanno colpito particolarmente (il che, ve lo confesso, è soprattutto un pro-memoria per me, che tuttavia condivido volentieri). All’interno di questo giudizio poco lusinghiero, vi devo confessare che però ho trovato una parte affascinante e straordinaria, la Parte IV, che sono le Anthill Chronicles, 8 capitoli scritti dal punto di vista delle formiche. Qui ho ritrovato il Wilson da me amato nelle sue opere saggistiche, un profondo conoscitore delle sue amate creature e un narratore affascinante. Anche in questo caso lascio a lui la parola:
“The Anthill Chronicles,” a section of the present narrative, is derived from scientific information about several real ant species compounded into one, documented individually, for example, by Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson in The Ants (1990) and The Superorganism (2009). It is written in a manner that presents the lives of these insects, as exactly as possible, from the ants’ point of view.
* * *
Ecco, infine, le citazioni (senza commenti, o quasi):
[...] the cat, which had drifted off into a ball of sleep [...] [770]
He undertook what small children do when stripped of mechanical toys and playmates and placed in a natural environment. They explore. They become hunter-gatherers. If they are fearless, and Raff was innocently fearless, they discover a multitude of creatures of kinds they have never seen in a zoo or picture book or on television, and for which there is no name. Each kind of plant and animal, because of the immediacy and its novelty and strangeness, is for a small child an entity of boundless possibility. [1411]
The velvet ant taught Raff an elemental principle of natural history: don’t mess with colorful creatures who show no fear of you. [1422]
It was enjoyable, and thereby true to the way the brain is constructed. It was ordained by genes to which modern classrooms and textbooks are ill-fitted. [1465]
In time he understood that nature was not something outside the human world. The reverse is true. Nature is the real world, and humanity exists on islands within it. [1669]
When defending the nest, elders were among the most suicidally aggressive. They were obedient to a simple truth that separates our two species: where humans send their young men to war, ants send their old ladies. [2266 – qui siamo "dalla parte delle formiche", e questa osservazione – fatta con il sorriso sulle labbra – è veramente profondissima]
When any organized system, whether a university, a city, or any assembly of organisms themselves, reaches a large enough size and diverse enough a population, and has enough time to evolve, it also becomes qualitatively different. The reason is elementary: the greater the number of parts interacting with one another, the more the new phenomena that emerge within it, therefore the more surprises student and teacher alike encounter each day, and the stranger and more interesting the world as a whole becomes. [3287 – anche questa molto bella, e anche molto familiare a chi ama esplorare e conoscere]
He assayed her as every heterosexual male does every good-looking young woman who comes into view, however fleetingly. The saccade proceeded in the usual, genetically programmed sequence. [3338 – avevo dimenticato di dire che Wilson è un gentiluomo del Sud, cresciuto nella fascia costiera tra Alabama e Florida, e che la storia è ambientata in quei posti]
He was familiar with the oft-quoted definition of investigative journalism: seduction followed by betrayal. [3787]
Raff lived by three maxims. Fortune favors the prepared mind. People follow someone who knows where he’s going. And control the middle, because that’s where the extremes eventually have to meet. [4189 – 3 massime che farei bene a tenere a mente anch'io]
E. O. Wilson è (stato) un autore molto controverso. Quando, nel 1975, pubblicò Sociobiology. The New Synthesis gli diedero addosso un po’ tutti: la destra religiosa (americana) che vedeva nella sociobiologia il potenziale di trasformarsi in una mitologia del materialismo scientistico, ma anche i progressisti che aderivamo al “modello standard delle scienze sociali”, secondo il quale i comportamenti umani sono culturalmente (e non geneticamente) acquisiti. La stessa comunità scientifica, specialmente una parte del “campo darwiniano”, con Stephen Jay Gould e Richard Lewontin in testa, contestò vivacemente le sue idee. Che adesso, a 35 anni di distanza, sono accettate abbastanza pacificamente. Ma all’epoca Wilson fu accusato di essere razzista e misogino, e a favore dell’eugenetica. Nel novembre del 1978, a una conferenza dell’AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science, di cui mi onoro di essere un membro) un collega gli versò in testa una brocca d’acqua. Wilson si vantò poi di essere stato l’unico scienziato in epoca moderna a essere stato aggredito per un’idea.
A vederlo adesso, ultraottantenne (questa foto è di un paio di anni, quando Wilson aveva per l’appunto appena compiuto 80 anni) non lo si direbbe uomo capace di scatenare polemiche così accese.
Wilson ha anche vinto due premi Pulitzer, il primo nel 1979 per On Human Nature, il secondo nel 1991 per The Ants (scritto con Bert Hölldobler). Profondamente innamorato del suo lavoro e aiutato da una grande capacità di raccontare in termini chiari e rigorosi, Wilson è anche un grande “divulgatore” (abbiamo giù parlato qui del diverso approccio, e della diversa terminologia, con cui nel mondo anglosassone si affronta il tema della popular science): proprio per questo nel 1994 è stato insignito di un altro premio, il Carl Sagan Award for Public Understanding of Science.
Con questo curriculum non mi sembra sorprendente che Wilson abbia voluto cimentarsi con la narrativa. Anzi, forse lo è piuttosto il fatto che abbia atteso la tarda età per farlo. I motivi di questa scelta, forse, è meglio lasciarli esporre allo stesso Wilson, nel Prologo del romanzo:
THIS IS A STORY about three parallel worlds, which nevertheless exist in the same space and time. They rise together, they fall, they rise again, but in cycles so different in magnitude that each is virtually invisible to the others.
The smallest are the ants, who build civilizations in the dirt. Their histories are epics that unfold on picnic grounds. Their colonies, like those of humans, are in perpetual conflict. War is a genetic imperative of most. The colonies grow and struggle and sometimes they triumph over their neighbors. Then they die, always.
Human societies are the second world. There are of course vast differences between ants and men. But in fundamental ways their cycles are similar. There is something genetic about this convergence. Because of it, ants are a metaphor for us, and we for them. Homer might have written equally of ants and men, Zeus has given us the fate of winding down our lives in painful wars, from youth until we perish, each of us.
Thousands of times greater in space and time is the third of our worlds, the biosphere, the totality of all life, plastered like a membrane over all of earth. The biosphere has its own epic cycles. Humanity, one of the countless species forming the biosphere, can perturb it, but we cannot leave it or destroy it without perishing ourselves. The cycles of the other species can be destroyed, and the biosphere corrupted. But for each careless step we take, our species will ultimately pay an unwelcome price—always. [139 – sono costretto come di consueto a citare la posizione sul Kindle]
Il problema, secondo me, è che scrivere un saggio scientifico (ancorché “divulgativo”) e scrivere un romanzo sono due cose molto diverse. Se dovessi giudicare Anthill secondo il metro critico con cui giudico abitualmente i romanzi dovrei dire che questo non è poi un granché. Soprattutto perché mi sembra che spesso l’autore si faccia prendere da un intento didattico-moralistico (ne potete cogliere le tracce già nel Prologo appena citato) che proprio non dovrebbero mai trasparire in un romanzo riuscito. E tuttavia, al termine della recensione, riprodurrò – come faccio sempre – alcuni passaggi che mi hanno colpito particolarmente (il che, ve lo confesso, è soprattutto un pro-memoria per me, che tuttavia condivido volentieri). All’interno di questo giudizio poco lusinghiero, vi devo confessare che però ho trovato una parte affascinante e straordinaria, la Parte IV, che sono le Anthill Chronicles, 8 capitoli scritti dal punto di vista delle formiche. Qui ho ritrovato il Wilson da me amato nelle sue opere saggistiche, un profondo conoscitore delle sue amate creature e un narratore affascinante. Anche in questo caso lascio a lui la parola:
“The Anthill Chronicles,” a section of the present narrative, is derived from scientific information about several real ant species compounded into one, documented individually, for example, by Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson in The Ants (1990) and The Superorganism (2009). It is written in a manner that presents the lives of these insects, as exactly as possible, from the ants’ point of view.
* * *
Ecco, infine, le citazioni (senza commenti, o quasi):
[...] the cat, which had drifted off into a ball of sleep [...] [770]
He undertook what small children do when stripped of mechanical toys and playmates and placed in a natural environment. They explore. They become hunter-gatherers. If they are fearless, and Raff was innocently fearless, they discover a multitude of creatures of kinds they have never seen in a zoo or picture book or on television, and for which there is no name. Each kind of plant and animal, because of the immediacy and its novelty and strangeness, is for a small child an entity of boundless possibility. [1411]
The velvet ant taught Raff an elemental principle of natural history: don’t mess with colorful creatures who show no fear of you. [1422]
It was enjoyable, and thereby true to the way the brain is constructed. It was ordained by genes to which modern classrooms and textbooks are ill-fitted. [1465]
In time he understood that nature was not something outside the human world. The reverse is true. Nature is the real world, and humanity exists on islands within it. [1669]
When defending the nest, elders were among the most suicidally aggressive. They were obedient to a simple truth that separates our two species: where humans send their young men to war, ants send their old ladies. [2266 – qui siamo "dalla parte delle formiche", e questa osservazione – fatta con il sorriso sulle labbra – è veramente profondissima]
When any organized system, whether a university, a city, or any assembly of organisms themselves, reaches a large enough size and diverse enough a population, and has enough time to evolve, it also becomes qualitatively different. The reason is elementary: the greater the number of parts interacting with one another, the more the new phenomena that emerge within it, therefore the more surprises student and teacher alike encounter each day, and the stranger and more interesting the world as a whole becomes. [3287 – anche questa molto bella, e anche molto familiare a chi ama esplorare e conoscere]
He assayed her as every heterosexual male does every good-looking young woman who comes into view, however fleetingly. The saccade proceeded in the usual, genetically programmed sequence. [3338 – avevo dimenticato di dire che Wilson è un gentiluomo del Sud, cresciuto nella fascia costiera tra Alabama e Florida, e che la storia è ambientata in quei posti]
He was familiar with the oft-quoted definition of investigative journalism: seduction followed by betrayal. [3787]
Raff lived by three maxims. Fortune favors the prepared mind. People follow someone who knows where he’s going. And control the middle, because that’s where the extremes eventually have to meet. [4189 – 3 massime che farei bene a tenere a mente anch'io]
jcoode's review against another edition
I can't rank the book because I didn't finish it -- I wanted to be interested but no, I was just bored. After reading some comments here on GoodReads I will try to tackle the Ant Chronicles, but after giving that a shot, I'll gladly send this back to the library and start something new.