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Matt Ridley can’t wait to finish one book before starting another. So he
usually has three on the go at once, “each in a different part of the house”,
says the biologist and author of Genome. His current crop consists of
Stephen Ambrose’s Undaunted Courage (Touchstone, 1997), about Lewis and
Clark’s journey across the American West in the early 19th century; Annie’s
Box by Randal Keynes (reviewed 28 April), the story of Charles Darwin’s
first daughter told by his great great grandson; and Tim Flannery’s The
Eternal Frontier,
(reviewed 16 June, p 50), which Ridley calls “a truly
brilliant book”.…