Word: thumbs
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...Panda's Thumb. Stephen Gould combines a feeling of childlike wonderment with pedagogical earnestness and leads his readers on a fascinating and entertaining field trip through the largest natural history museum of them all--the world. Instead of exhibits, though, Gould presents us with a collection of essays that bring to life the subjects of natural history better than any reconstructed dinosaur of stuffed dodo...
Gould has selected uniformly amusing and informative illustrations for his theme. In the essay that gives the book its title, he describes a thumb-like appendage on a panda's paw that helps it strip the leaves from bamboo shoots, a panda's favorite meal. The depiction of the panda in its natural habitat typifies the light yet information-filled passages that make this book eminently readable for the non-scientist...
Today more and more scientists seem to be matching their talent for experimentation with a surprising gift for exposition. One of them is a Harvard paleontologist named Stephen Jay Gould, 39, author of two pellucid collections of essays on evolution (Ever Since Darwin, The Panda's Thumb). Another is Dr. Lewis Thomas, 66, whose humane writings on biology and medicine in the pages of the New England Journal of Medicine became the basis for two bestsellers (The Lives of a Cell, The Medusa and the Snail). Others include Physicists Jeremy Bernstein, 50, a regular contributor to The New Yorker; Robert...
...counting everybody on the staff, and we'd all be talking. When he'd walk in, everyone would just stop right in the middle of a sentence. He'd sit down, take out a pack of cigarettes, beat one on his thumb to pack it down, light it and smoke the whole damn thing without saying a word. He just had that magic about him: if he was going to say anything, you were going to be sure you didn't miss...
...confident that Harvard can win over the hearts--and wallets--of its alumni. As for those who don't share his lifelong adoration of Veritas, well, he believes that the appeal will reach them, too, largely because the solicitation techniques radiate sophistication and reflect the best rule-of-thumb in any seduction process: "One doesn't get it because one asks for it, one has to persuade the potential donor that he'll feel better if he makes the gift...