Every Living Thing: Man's Obsessive Quest to Catalog Life, from Nanobacteria to New Monkeys

From the Regulator Bookshop:

Time: Tuesday, February 3, 2009 7:00 p.m.

Location: Regulator Bookshop

Title of Event: Rob Dunn

NCSU ecology professor Rob Dunn will discuss and sign copies of his new book, Every Living Thing: Man's Obsessive Quest to Catalog Life, from Nanobacteria to New Monkeys. Dunn, an engaging science popularizer, tells the exhilarating story of humanity's quest to discover everything about our natural world from the unimaginably small in the most inhospitable of places on earth to the unimaginably far away in the unexplored canals on Mars. For more information see the author's website.

From the book descripiton:

Biologists and laypeople alike have repeatedly claimed victory over life. A thousand years ago we thought we knew almost everything; a hundred years ago, too. But even today, Rob Dunn argues, discoveries we can't yet imagine still await.

In a series of vivid portraits of single-minded scientists, Dunn traces the history of human discovery, from the establishment of classification in the eighteenth century to today's attempts to find life in space. The narrative telescopes from a scientist's attempt to find one single thing (a rare ant-emulating beetle species) to another scientist's attempt to find everything in a small patch of jungle in Guanacaste, Costa Rica. With poetry and humor, Dunn reminds readers how tough and exhilarating it is to study the natural world, and why it matters.