"An acclaimed science writer with a flair for giving reality the luster of myth."
Publishers Weekly
"Sims has the breadth...of Montaigne of Robert Burton or Sir Thomas Browne, the whimsical omnivorousness of the 18th-century essayists....[He] seems not only to have read everything, the trivial as well as the lofty, but to have remembered all of it."
John Banville,
New York Times Book Review
(lead review)
"With the brain of a scientist and the voice of a poet, Michael Sims makes the commonplace become truly miraculous."
Ross King
"A great poet and storyteller...[with] a rare gift for showing the most taken-for-granted basics of human life as radical, mystical and strange."
Bookslut
"Sims [writes] with wisdom, wit and unobtrusive erudition."
Alberto Manguel
"[Sims's] message to the reader is to think, but to have a good time doing so."
Deborah Blum
"Something of an all-rounder and clearly as comfortable writing about science as the arts."
The Times (London)
"Sims is best at linking ideas and things: Think of it as literary hand-eye coordination."
Jerome Weeks, Dallas Morning News
"Michael Sims displays an astonishing erudition and great feeling."
Frans de Waal
"An urbane, witty, and encyclopedic raconteur."
Paul Mariani
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Michael Sims is an internationally acclaimed nonfiction author, journalist, editor, and speaker.
Although he has written about everything from watershed ecology to Victorian crime fiction, from satirical poetry to air pollution, his unique turf is the borderland where nature and culture meet: the wild and crazy landscape where the human imagination responds to the natural world, resulting in anything from Planet of the Apes to the Scopes Trial to pink plastic flamingos.
Michael's essays, articles, reviews, and book excerpts have appeared in many periodicals, including Orion, American Archaeology, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Chronicle of Higher Education, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, England's New Statesman, Australia's Financial Review, and alternative weeklies from Charleston to Honolulu.
Click on a book jacket in the row above for more information on any of Michael's four books on nature and science:
IN THE WOMB: Animals (National Geographic Books, spring 2009)
APOLLO'S FIRE: A Day on Earth in Nature and Imagination (Viking, 2007)
ADAM'S NAVEL: A Natural and Cultural History of the Human Form (Penguin UK and Viking, 2007)
DARWIN'S ORCHESTRA: An Almanac of Nature in History and the Arts (Henry Holt, 1997)
Or for the three anthologies he has edited for Penguin Classics:
THE PENGUIN BOOK OF GASLIGHT CRIME:
Con Artists, Burglars, Rogues, and Scoundrels from the Time of Sherlock Holmes (spring, 2009)
Edited with Notes and Introduction by Michael Sims
THE ANNOTATED ARCHY AND MEHITABEL (2006)
by Don Marquis / Edited with Notes and Introduction by Michael Sims
ARSÈNE LUPIN, GENTLEMAN-THIEF (2007)
by Maurice Leblanc / Edited with Notes and Introduction by Michael Sims
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