Edward O. Wilson, who sadly passed away this December, was a great thinker and one of the most influential figures in natural science. His voice will be missed. But thankfully anyone who wants to know him better can read this thorough biography. The book is very detailed and maybe not the best choice for someone who hasn't heard about Wilson – but if you have followed his work and read his books, you will find many interesting insights here.

Thanks to the publisher, Doubleday Books, and NetGalley for an advanced copy of this book.

This is a good introduction to Edward O. Wilson’s work. Wilson was a highly productive, intelligent scientist whose initial focus was on the ant world. Later he expanded into other species, ecology and humans. When he wrote a textbook on sociobiology things got controversial. People started protesting him and his work, lecturing and attending conferences became difficult due to the protests and anger people directed at him.

The book covers some of his personal life, particularly growing up and a bit about his wife. Shortly after being engaged Wilson had an opportunity of exploration that he couldn’t pass up, so they parted and wrote each other letters, which many of the early chapters drew on.

There is too much in this man’s life to cover in detail at all phases, that would require a very long book, if not volumes. Wilson himself has written over 30 books, many bestsellers and several textbooks, and hundreds of scientific papers. This book feels like just the beginning of covering Wilson’s life. There is so much more to explore.

Holy moly - who knew? This book is the reason I love reading. I had never heard of E.O. Wilson and when I stated reading I didn’t know if this book was for me - but I kept reading - and am so glad I did. What a fascinating person! This book is compelling in the way it’s written and I learned things I never knew - which I loved. I recommend this book and am grateful to Doubleday for giving me an advanced copy.

American historian and author Richard Rhodes wrote the award winning book 'The Making of the Atomic Bomb' and later published 'Energy: A Human History.' Now Rhodes has branched out to biography again with this book about Edward Osborne Wilson (known as E.O. Wilson), a world-renowned American biologist, naturalist, and writer.

Ever since I studied wasp taxonomy in graduate school, I've greatly admired the great ant taxonomist (among other things) E. O. Wilson. So I was happy to read this narrative about the famous scientist's life and work. For a deep dive into Wilson's scientific achievements, you'd have to read his books and articles. But if you just want to learn a bit about Wilson as a person - and get an overview of his contributions to science - this book, which is filled with fun personal details, is a good place to start.

E.O. Wilson, born in 1929, became interested in insects - especially ants - as a child. Despite being accidently blinded in one eye at age seven, Wilson was a seasoned researcher by his teens. Rhodes writes, "In a vacant lot in Mobile, Alabama, when Wilson was only 13 years old, he'd been the first collector in the United States to spot the invasion of the pestilential red imported fire ant, Solenopsis invicta, transported from Argentina as a ship stowaway." So the great biologist was off to a good start!

Later, in Wilson's second year as a junior fellow at Harvard in the early 1950s, the biologist was invited to collect ants in the South Pacific for the Harvard Museum. During Wilson's trip he discovered many new ant species, demonstrating he was both far-seeing and lucky. Wilson noted, "At the time I entered college only about a dozen scientists around the world were engaged full-time in the study of ants. I had struck gold before the rush began. Almost every research project I began thereafter, no matter how unsophisticated (and all were unsophisticated) yielded discoveries publishable in scientific journals."

Rhodes provides a detailed description of Wilson's South Pacific ant collecting trip, during which the scientist gathered at least 1,000 species. In addition, Rhodes enlivens the narrative with snippets from Wilson's letters to his fiancée Irene. For example, about arriving in Fiji, Wilson wrote, "Never before or afterward in my life have I felt such a surge of high expectation - of pure exhilaration - as in those few minutes. I carried no high-technology instruments, only a hand lens, forceps, specimen vials, notebooks, quinine, sulfanilamide, youth desire, and unbounded hope." And from natives on Fiji, Wilson learned the island's historic cannibals thought "human flesh was salty, not as tasty as pig."

When Christmas rolled around, Wilson was in New Caledonia (a French collective) and Santa Claus was supposed to arrive by French submarine, but could only muster an old tugboat. Santa was greeted anyway by a crowd of more than a thousand people, "including many children and fascinated New Caledonian natives and Indochinese and Malayans."

Later, on the island of Espiritu Santo Wilson marveled at the rainforest, with giant trees, gorgeous little parrots and pigeons, and flying foxes (giant fruit-eating bats) - considered a delicacy. When Wilson later tried eating flying fox he found it "gamy, tasting just about what you'd expect from bat meat" and could only swallow a few bites.

Afterwards, in Australia, Wilson marveled, "What a country! Hundreds and hundreds of miles of rough little roads and byways without a habitation along them or even an advertising sign now and then, just tens of thousands of square miles of eucalypt forest and sandplain.

From Australia Wilson headed to New Guinea, "one of the last and greatest strongholds of stone-age man and the primeval forest and my premier destination on this trip." Wilson told Irene he expected the fieldwork in New Guinea to be "the most exciting of my life." And indeed it was. Among the more than 50 species of ants collected in New Guinea, Wilson found species that lived in silk bags hung from trees and army ant colonies with hundreds of thousands of workers. On the downside, there were "endless, enormous, aggressive, consuming hordes of mosquitoes that are after you every minute of the day."

After more stops, Wilson returned to America, and later noted, "Finally, clad in khaki and heavy boots, crew-cut, twenty pounds underweight, and tinted faint yellow from the antimalarial drug quinacrine, I fell into [my fiancée] Renee's arms."

As a biologist who'd seen diverse fauna everywhere, Wilson was interested in the evolution of animals. In 1859, Charles Darwin proposed that biological evolution occurs as a result of natural selection, which is the idea that in any given generation, some individuals - who are slightly better adapted - are more likely to survive and reproduce than others. We now know that these 'better adaptations' are controlled by DNA (genes), whose structure was described by James Watson and Francis Crick in 1953.

Wilson wanted to study the kinds of processes that create biodiversity, and much of his work involved field studies like those he did in the South Pacific. Ironically, this put Wilson at odds with his fellow Harvard professor, DNA describer James Watson, who believed biology could be best pursued in the lab.

At one point, Wilson wrote, "I found [Watson] the most unpleasant human being I had ever met....At twenty-eight, he was only a year older. He arrived with a conviction that biology must be transformed into a science directed at molecules and cells and rewritten in the language of physics and chemistry...His bad manners were tolerated because of the greatness of the discovery he had made." Rhodes writes a good deal about the epic rivalry between Wilson and Watson, which resulted in the division of biological studies at Harvard into the separate departments of molecular biology and evolutionary biology.

Rhodes describes Wilson's collaboration with other scientists and mathematicians; Wilson's studies of ant pheromones; Wilson's studies of populations and biogeography; Wilson's experiments related to repopulating denuded islands; Wilson's theories about altruistic behavior (sacrificing oneself so relatives with shared genes survive); Wilson's expansion into vertebrate biology; the brouhaha surrounding Wilson's publication of the book Sociobiology (this section is a humdinger!); Wilson's interest in hereditary influence on human behavior (also very controversial); Wilson's drive to catalogue ALL species on the planet; Wilson's efforts to conserve/restore natural habitats so species are protected; Wilson's books and other publications; and more.

Perhaps appealing to human self-interest (if not love of nature), Wilson pleads for preserving species because, "Only a tiny fraction of species with potential economic importance has been used....A far larger number, tens of thousands of plants and millions of animals, have never even been studied well enough to assess their potential."

Wilson also developed theories about the evolution of social insects (like ants, bees and wasps) and describes some of their more dramatic behavior. Writing about the relentless sweep of Eciton burchelli (army ants) across a lowland forest in South America, Wilson wrote "they are a big conspicuous species that link themselves together around their mother queen in chains and nets that accumulate layer upon interlocking layer until finally the entire worker force - as many as 700,000 individuals - comprises a solid mass." Another ant specialist observed about an army ant horde, "For an Eciton burchelli raid nearing the height of its development in swarming, picture a rectangular body of 15 meters or more in width and 1 to 2 meters in depth, made of of many tens of thousands of scurrying reddish-black individuals....[which] bring disaster to practically all animal life that lies in their path and fails to escape."

When Wilson retired from Harvard in 1996, he wanted to devote most of his time to his first love, the study of ants, and he continued to add to the field of myrmecology. Wilson also continued his other work, and in 2014 the E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Laboratory was opened in Mozambique. The facility offers long-term research and training in biodiversity documentation, ecology, and conservation biology to visiting researchers from both Mozambique and abroad.

Wilson has a good sense of humor as well. Asked "What do I do about the ants in my kitchen?" Wilson (half-seriously) replied, "Watch where you step. Be careful of the little lives. Feed them crumbs of coffeecake. They also like bit of tuna and whipped cream. Get a magnifying glass. Watch them closely. And you will be as close to any person may ever come to seeing social life as it might evolve on another planet."

In addition to being a great scientist, Wilson is a loving husband and father to his wife Irene and daughter Catherine. Now in his nineties, Wilson is still working and adding to his admirable legacy.

I enjoyed the book and highly recommend it to readers interested in E.O. Wilson.

Thanks to Netgalley, Richard Rhodes, and Doubleday for a copy of the book.

Mr. Rhodes is a highly regarded author and "Scientist" is an authorized biography of E.O. Wilson who has written many of my very favorite books on science. Sadly, Mr. Rhodes' effort did not meet my expectations. My advice would be to have Wilson write his own autobiography./