A review by runnersue73
Anthill by Edward O. Wilson

3.0

This is a hard book to review; it was kind of unusual. It is the story of a man's quest to protect a tract of southern forest that he loves. The story, though, goes ALL the way back to his childhood to explain his experiences there and how he came to love it and what all his experiences were there, then follows him to Harvard so we could follow as he became a lawyer in order to save the land (and also details his first romantic experiences, which are kind of tangential to the plot), then back home again, where religious fundamentalist thugs try to kill him for no apparent reason except that they think environmentalists are working against God's ultimate plan. There was a digression into the main character's senior paper on ants, which was informative and interesting but something I've never seen inserted into a novel. Also, if it really was supposed to be a biological research paper it was probably lacking in scientific observation and data; it was more an artistic description of the ant colony, but his professors were all describing the paper as brilliant, which seems a bit unlikely to me. But I suppose inserting a realistic scientific paper would lose a lot of readers!