The Snoring Bird

August 30, 2009

The Snoring Bird: My Family's Journey Through a Century of Biology by Bernd Heinrich takes us from air battles in World War I to a frantic flight during World War II to resettlement in rural Maine as Heinrich shares the true story of his Papa Gerd's relentless and systematic pursuit of wasps in the family Ichneumonidae. With uncanny honesty, Heinrich shares the influences and results of growing up within a family where science is king. I found this so good that I wanted  to stretch it out, so I limited my nightly reading to one (OK, maybe two) chapters a night.