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Island Africa: The Evolution of Africa's Rare Animals and Plants
The vastness of Africa and the variety of animals it contains overwhelm any visitor with colors and patterns. Contrary to superficial appearances, however, this monolithic continent is a complex mosaic of landlocked islands--islands which vary from isolated forests in oceans of grassland to lakes in seas of land. The flora and fauna of each of these islands represent a snapshot of millions of years of evolution and the biological reaction to the environment of the past. In this richly illustrated book Jonathan Kingdon takes these island communities one by one and delves back into their history to explain why and how they may have evolved as they have and thus the reason why the community is there. As the reader is led through continental Africa, a pattern begins to take shape, providing an understanding of Africa's complexities and putting the continent's biology in a new and dynamic perspective. Kingdon's book is also a fervent plea to conserve these "islands." It will be of surpassing interest to anyone concerned with working in African conservation as well as to a wide audience of other general readers.
287 pages, Hardcover
First published February 1, 1990
About the author
Jonathan Kingdon
42 books9 followers
Jonathan Kingdon is a zoologist, science author, and artist; a research associate at the University of Oxford. He focuses on taxonomic illustration and evolution of the mammals of Africa. He is a contributor to The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
Unbelievably good! This great work dissects and analyses all the big centres of endemism in Africa and how they interact for speciation from a biogeographic perspective. You will get a big picture, yes, but that comes with hundreds of powerful and very detailed examples. Moreover, wonderful illustrations in many styles go hand in hand throughout pages written with fluid and passionate prose. If you are curious about Africa or generally interested in evolution, ecology, conservation, or -even better - if you consider yourself a naturalist, I highly recommend this masterpiece.
This book is an incredibly ambitious piece of work. It's bafflingly synoptic in scope for a single author, covering a huge and diverse continent in an inclusive (though still far from comprehensive, of course) taxonomic scope from large mammals to plants to beetles. And it has tons of illustrations in dozens of styles, maps on practically every page showing historical climate and geology conditions or range maps for dozens of isolated species, usually matched up to illustrations of each. It's ambitious not only insofar as it attempts to do a lot, but insofar as it seems to succeed. I just don't understand how he did all of this, to be honest.
Which makes it all the more shocking that, not only does he have no co-authors, there are no citations for any claims, no further reading provided for any of the dozens of interesting stories he tells (inevitably based on decades of fieldwork by somebody), not even credit for the art or maps. Dunno what the deal with that is or how it got to print without them. :/
Kingdon's thesis, the "Island" idea, is an interesting one as an evolutionary ecology idea, but it's much more revelatory as you see it play it. Essentially, he's arguing that while Africa is full of charismatic megafauna famous around the world, its true biodiversity lies in a collection of small, isolated habitat fragments with unique climatic, geologic, and colonization histories. Some of these are straggling relic species, formerly much larger in range but now reduced to a small area that retains the habitat traits they need. Others are recent radiations, savanna species forced into forests that have adapted in unique ways at different points in a mountain chain, radiations of species from a broad range that have recently become isolated.
The vast majority of the book is an unstructured list of such stories, a paragraph on butterflies followed by one on duikers and then plants, with no real transition or organization beyond the chapter-level geographic areas. That's unfortunate, because there are plenty of moments when the way Kingdon presents these stories is unlike anything I've read elsewhere. They don't treat species as a fixed fact but as a tapestry moving across the landscape over eons, ebbing and flowing in particular ways as the climate dries and moistens and volcanoes rise and erode. I bet there's enough information on species' autecology, on paleoclimate and paleontology, that someone could write an incredibly in-depth tome like this for North America or Europe. Maybe Kingdon is going beyond the bounds of evidence; it sometimes feels like there's no way so much is known about so many species. But there's no way to know cuz he didn't give references, I suppose.
Anyway, that synthetic perspective emerges in glimpses, but it largely just reads as a series of lists. Each chapter presents some general climate and geography for its topic region, followed by an amorphous set of endemic taxa, then a short note on conservation history. The work of assembling those stories into any larger regional history falls to the reader, who was often, in my experience, simply too fatigued from reading the lists to be bothered. It's a shame, because it has so much going for it otherwise. I want to say it'd be great as a reference material if you were travelling to one of the topic regions and especially doing conservation or ecology work there, and it would be enlightening, but the fact that it doesn't list its sources is kinda an automatic fail on that score?
Which makes it all the more shocking that, not only does he have no co-authors, there are no citations for any claims, no further reading provided for any of the dozens of interesting stories he tells (inevitably based on decades of fieldwork by somebody), not even credit for the art or maps. Dunno what the deal with that is or how it got to print without them. :/
Kingdon's thesis, the "Island" idea, is an interesting one as an evolutionary ecology idea, but it's much more revelatory as you see it play it. Essentially, he's arguing that while Africa is full of charismatic megafauna famous around the world, its true biodiversity lies in a collection of small, isolated habitat fragments with unique climatic, geologic, and colonization histories. Some of these are straggling relic species, formerly much larger in range but now reduced to a small area that retains the habitat traits they need. Others are recent radiations, savanna species forced into forests that have adapted in unique ways at different points in a mountain chain, radiations of species from a broad range that have recently become isolated.
The vast majority of the book is an unstructured list of such stories, a paragraph on butterflies followed by one on duikers and then plants, with no real transition or organization beyond the chapter-level geographic areas. That's unfortunate, because there are plenty of moments when the way Kingdon presents these stories is unlike anything I've read elsewhere. They don't treat species as a fixed fact but as a tapestry moving across the landscape over eons, ebbing and flowing in particular ways as the climate dries and moistens and volcanoes rise and erode. I bet there's enough information on species' autecology, on paleoclimate and paleontology, that someone could write an incredibly in-depth tome like this for North America or Europe. Maybe Kingdon is going beyond the bounds of evidence; it sometimes feels like there's no way so much is known about so many species. But there's no way to know cuz he didn't give references, I suppose.
Anyway, that synthetic perspective emerges in glimpses, but it largely just reads as a series of lists. Each chapter presents some general climate and geography for its topic region, followed by an amorphous set of endemic taxa, then a short note on conservation history. The work of assembling those stories into any larger regional history falls to the reader, who was often, in my experience, simply too fatigued from reading the lists to be bothered. It's a shame, because it has so much going for it otherwise. I want to say it'd be great as a reference material if you were travelling to one of the topic regions and especially doing conservation or ecology work there, and it would be enlightening, but the fact that it doesn't list its sources is kinda an automatic fail on that score?
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January 23, 2012
I didn't intend to read this book at all. I was really after the fantastic illustrations of forms of life I never knew existed, far outside your standard zoo fare. However, the writing itself is not too shabby. It's a slightly outdated read in the fast-paced world of conservation, but not by much. Kingdon is smart and intuitive about the business of conserving biological diversity, and his final point is that people should talk to each other--businessmen, ecologists, World Bank board members, locals, amateurs, and authorities. To avoid overwhelming our pretty little planet, communication has got to improve.
But even if you don't think you're interested in Africa or conservation, you ought to pick this up for the pictures alone.
But even if you don't think you're interested in Africa or conservation, you ought to pick this up for the pictures alone.
Read
July 30, 2013
how do I download or read this but besides from this question I would like to say that I find this book very interesting just by reading the description
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews