For more than two decades, award-winning science and nature writer David Quammen has traveled to Earth’s most far-flung and fragile destinations, sending back field notes from places caught in the tension between humans and the wild. A new book “The Heartbeat of the Wild” features 20 of those assignments: elegantly written narratives, originally published in National Geographic magazine and updated for today. He shares encounters with African elephants, chimpanzees, and gorillas (and their saviors, including Jane Goodall); the salmon of northeastern Russia and the people whose livelihood depends on them; the lions of Kenya and the villagers whose homes border on parks created to preserve the species; and the champions of rewilding efforts in southernmost South America, designed to rescue iconic species including jaguars and macaws.
David Quammen’s books include Breathless, The Tangled Tree, The Song of the Dodo, The Reluctant Mr. Darwin, and Spillover, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and recipient of the Premio Letterario Merck, in Rome. He has written for The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, The Atlantic, National Geographic, and Outside, among other magazines, and is a three-time winner of the National Magazine Award. Quammen shares a home in Bozeman, Montana, with his wife, Betsy Gaines Quammen, author of American Zion, and with two Russian wolfhounds, a cross-eyed cat, and a rescue python.
