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Summary
Summary
Winner of the 2010 Heartland Prize, Anthill follows the thrilling adventures of a modern-day Huck Finn, enthralled with the "strange, beautiful, and elegant" world of his native Nokobee County. But as developers begin to threaten the endangered marshlands around which he lives, the book's hero decides to take decisive action. Edward O. Wilson--the world's greatest living biologist--elegantly balances glimpses of science with the gripping saga of a boy determined to save the world from its most savage ecological predator: man himself.
Author Notes
Edward O. Wilson is widely recognized as one of the world's preeminent biologists and naturalists. The author of more than twenty books, including The Creation, The Social Conquest of Earth, The Meaning of Human Existence, and Letters to a Young Scientist, Wilson is a professor emeritus at Harvard University. The winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, he lives in Lexington, Massachusetts.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
A Pulitzer Prize-winning nonfiction author and Harvard entomology professor, Wilson (The Ants) channels Huck Finn in his creative coming-of-age debut novel. Split into three parallel worlds-ants, humans, and the biosphere-the story follows young Raff Cody, who escapes the humid summers in Clayville, Ala., by exploring the remote Nokobee wilderness with his cousin, Junior. In one adventure, sneaking onto the property of a reputed multiple murderer to peek at his rumored 1,000-pound pet alligator, 15-year-old Raff faces down the barrel of a rifle. Raff's aversion to game hunting, ant fascination, Boy Scout achievements, and Harvard education all support his core need to remain a "naturalist explorer." A remarkable center section meticulously details the life and death of an ant colony. Nearing 30, Raff's desire to preserve the Nokobee reserve from greedy real estate developers galvanizes an effort to protect the sacred land and a surprise violent ending brings everything full circle. Lush with organic details, Wilson's keen eye for the natural world and his acumen for environmental science is on brilliant display in this multifaceted story about human life and its connection to nature. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Raphael Semmes Cody of Clayville, Alabama, nicknamed Raff, wants to please his mismatched parents, but he isn't comfortable with his working-class father's rules for manliness or the ambitions of his mother's wealthy family. He instead finds meaning, beauty, and a calling in a tract of old-growth longleaf pine forest surrounding Lake Nokobee, a rare and vulnerable swath of wilderness Wilson describes with bewitching precision and profound appreciation. A foremost authority on ants, an eloquent environmentalist, and the winner of two Pulitzer Prizes for his exceptional nonfiction, Wilson has written a debut novel of astonishing dimension, acuity, and spirit. As Raff evolves from an ardent boy naturalist to a zealous student enthralled by a mound-building ant species to a Harvard-trained lawyer, Wilson dramatizes conflicts of great complexity and consequence within parallel worlds, becoming the veritable Homer of Antdom as he brings ant colonies in peace and at war to startlingly vivid life. As gentlemanly Raff walks a fine line in his heroic efforts to save the precious, pristine Nokobee Woods, violence, a force Wilson perceives as intrinsic to this pitiless world, percolates. With lyrical exactitude, empathy for all life, and a shocking conclusion, Wilson's wise, provocative novel of the interaction between humankind and the rest of nature expresses a resonant earth ethic.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
A protagonist grows up immersed in the ways of social insects. SCIENTISTS hardly ever write novels. Fabricating imaginary people is not the domain of the scientific method, to put it mildly. Constructing a plot, lacing it with clues to lead the reader to a well-prepared conclusion, is heretical business for those trained to unprejudiced observation. But any who take the leap may use their worldliness to good advantage, smuggling gems of empirical knowledge across the literary border to create fiction with unusually rewarding heft. Consider the meticulous puzzle-solving of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (a trained surgeon) or the flights of physics in Alan Lightman's "Einstein's Dreams." Next, think of Edward O. Wilson, one of the most important biological theorists since Darwin. Author of some two dozen books, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, expert on social insects, discoverer of new species, passionate advocate of biodiversity, he is best known for his groundbreaking work on the evolution of social behavior. He had a considerable cache of scholarship to tuck into his pockets before slipping across the genre line to write his first novel, "Anthill." Wilson, who turns 81 this year, has written what he knows: a southern Alabama boy comes of age in the thrall of ants, nature and solitude, determined to save what he loves from destruction. His protagonist, Raff Cody, inhabits working-class Clayville and all its mysteries, which extend beyond the complex codes of social ambition on his mother's side and his father's simpler rules of manhood into the wild edges of Nokobee County. There he prowls the pine woodlands, catching spiders and frogs for close scrutiny. The story's nominal narrator is a biology professor who mentors the boy at Florida State University but has known him from childhood. Professor Norville frames the account in frank, objective prose: Raff's family history is phylogeny; his settings are habitats; his parents' marital conflicts appear preordained by different biological interests. When new characters appear, their clothing and features are described as if to make them identifiable in a field guide to the humans. Behavior is noted likewise. As a boy turning over logs in the woods, Raff absorbs rules of life for later use. (Principle No. 1: "Don't antagonize your opponent unnecessarily.") As a young man assessing a potential girlfriend, he proceeds "in the usual, genetically programmed sequence. . . . JoLane had a keen, intelligent face and two of the traits scientifically considered beautiful, small chin and wide-spaced eyes, but not the third, high cheekbones." The twinkle in this tale lies in its irony, as the reader absorbs the premise that we are the equal of ants. When 10-year-old Raff is dragged by his mother to visit the family matriarch, Aunt Jessica, she is the perfect Queen Ant. Sitting torpid in her chamber, she disseminates faint odors and crucial information about the family while her mysteriously unpaid lifelong servant scurries about bringing soda crackers. The great-aunt's sagas stupefy Raff - "He was neither the genealogist nor the mathematician required for such a celebration of the deceased multitude" - but he follows wide-eyed as the worker-ant Sissy forays outside the house muttering, "Look there, look there," grasping a hen from the chicken yard, dispatching her prey with the succinct announcement: "Dinner." If ants wrote a stage play for human characters, it would look like this. In a fascinating turn, Wilson does the opposite in the book's middle section, titled "The Anthill Chronicles." Presented as Raff's undergraduate thesis, it carries the reader down the ant-hole to describe life from the ants' point of view. No writer could do this better, and Wilson's passion serves him best here. His language achieves poetic transcendence when describing "the decency of ants," whose disabled members "leave and trouble no more." When the nest must be defended, its eldest residents - with the least long-term utility remaining to them - become the most suicidally aggressive, "obedient to a simple truth that separates our two species: Where humans send their young men to war, ants send their old ladies." During his studies Raff discovers an ant supercolony, in which a mutation has removed the ants' capacity to recognize the subtle, important cues that create limits within and between nests. Colonies thus impaired grow boundless in size, extracting resources until their habitats collapse. The lesson is not lost on Raff. When real estate developers plan to acquire his beloved Nokobee Tract, one of the last unspoiled stands of old-growth pine savanna, he is moved from his reverie to consider what is possible against long odds. "Anthill" presents Raff as a mid-20th-century Huck Finn, complete with a stolen river skiff and 600-pound alligator in the opening scene, but this hero has less mischief in him, and earns more advanced degrees. Raff is dutiful, uncomplicated and extremely well organized for a young male Homo sapiens. He is an Eagle Scout. After college he puts himself through Harvard Law for the apparent purpose of negotiating one crucial contract down the line. In his logical single-mindedness he sometimes sounds like an Alabama-born Mr. Spock. But the denizens of his home turf, when he returns to it, are as real as a Gulf hurricane: rumpled newspapermen, target-shooting lawyers and murderous renegade Bible thumpers. Even the 600-pound alligator will rise again. By story's end the reader surely will want to believe in Raff and his mission, egged on by the hypothesis that human developments, like mutant supercolonies, doom themselves with the iron credo "Grow or die." THE comparison is not unexpected from an author who has spent four distinguished decades studying social behavior and its adaptive value. But it is bold. However logical it may be to assume that the forces of nature create human nature, Wilson's previous forays into the subject have stirred up swarms of controversy. Like most innovative thinkers, Wilson has been "whipsawed . . . with alternating praise and condemnation," to use his own words in describing the response to his landmark synthesis "Sociobiology" (1975) and its follow-up, "On Human Nature" (1978). His work reset the ground rules for evolutionary biologists and comparative psychologists, but some people were enraged by the suggestion that human behavior is driven by the same forces that govern all of life - for example, that males are genetically rewarded for sowing wild oats, while a female's best reproductive bet is to secure a faithful partner to help rear her acutely needy young. Sociobiology, as a unifying theory of behavior, is profoundly more nuanced than any simple construct about men and women. But sound bites have consistently oversimplified it and raised the ire of a public ever eager to mistake an observer's statement of "This is" for a moralist's "This is what should be." Fiction is a safer place for drawing on nature to illuminate the human condition, for it is generally understood as metaphor rather than recommendation. Melville gave us whales and obsession, Orwell gave us pigs and politicians. Now Wilson suggests with winning conviction that in our own colonies, we proceed at our peril when we cast off mindful restraint in favor of unchecked growth. It's hard to resist the notion that as we bustle around with our heads bent to the day's next task, we are like nothing so much as a bunch of ants. A simple truth that separates two species: 'Where humans send their young men to war, ants send their old ladies.' Barbara Kingsolver was trained as a biologist. She is the author of 13 books of nonfiction and fiction, including her most recent novel, "The Lacuna."
Library Journal Review
Raphael Semmes Cody, half Mobile, AL, gentry and the rest, Clayville, AL, redneck, is a lonely kid who revels in summers spent exploring the Nokobee swampland, an environmentally sensitive tract bordering Florida's panhandle, home to longleaf pines, swallowtail kites, snakes, gators, and bugs. Best of all, Nokobee is where Raff Cody crosses paths with Florida State science Professor Fred Norville, who recognizes a fellow naturalist in the calm, self-contained young man who prefers the company of ants to that of people. Norville's influence and the Semmes family's money combine to secure Raff a first-class education in nearby Tallahassee, a law degree from Harvard, and the opportunity to return to Mobile with a plan to protect Nokobee for future generations. Famed naturalist Wilson, himself a Harvard-educated Alabama native, has won Pulitzers for his nonfiction (On Human Nature; The Ants). Touted as a novel, this book reads more like creative nonfiction, especially in light of the jarring inclusion of Raff's 70-page thesis on the Trailhead ant colony. Verdict Though his characters come off as one-dimensional, Wilson excels at describing the pungent smells and tranquil silence of the disappearing wetlands of Alabama. Recommend to readers of authors known for evoking a strong sense of place, like Marjorie Rawlings, Peter Matthiessen, or Marjory Stoneman Douglas. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 12/09.]-Sally Bissell, Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Fort Myers, FL (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
