Naming Nature wins 2010 Washington State Book Award

Naming Nature chosen as a finalist for LA Times Book Prize

Read an excerpt in the New York Times

Hear Carol discuss the book on NPR's Living on Earth

Read Carol's essay in the NYT on what the film Avatar has to do with Naming Nature

_____praise_____

Named one of the Best Books of 2009 by New Scientist

Named one of the Best Sci-Tech Books of 2009 by Library Journal

"A sensuous delight...”
---Oprah Magazine.

“In this bracing and brilliant book, Yoon...delivers a thrill ride.”
---The Boston Globe

“Wondrous...rivets unsuspecting readers to the page. Superb.”
--Kirkus (Starred Review)

“A lively blend of popular scientific history and cultural criticism, itself defying simple classification.”
---The New York Times

“Optimistic, exhilarating and revolutionary.”
---Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

"Impossible to put down."
---Booklist

“Fearlessly iconoclastic...a thrilling paean.”
--Time Out New York

“Ingenious...compelling.”
--San Francisco Chronicle

“A fascinating exploration”
--Orion Magazine

Excerpted as a Recommended Read by Scientific American

Praise from Scholarly Journals:

“Personal and readable...Yoon’s book comes alive”
---Nature

"...refreshing and unpretentious. These chapters also offer new details not found in other (more technical) books that have also dealt with the history of taxonomy...a gratifying reading...witty and confident...bold."
--Systematic Biology

“Rich in insight, characters, humor, and even, yes, truth.”
--Wilson Quarterly


Advance Praise:

Taxonomy may not seem like a subject for the non-scientist, but as Carol Yoon makes clear in this original, delightful, and wise book, it is precisely what we need to know to understand ourselves and our world.  No matter what method of classification you use, old school or new, you will find Yoon descends from the best writers of popular science, Stephen Jay Gould and Brian Greene among them.
-Sue Halpern, author of Migrations to Solitude, Four Wings and a Prayer: Caught in the Mystery of the Monarch Butterfly and Can't Remember What I Forgot: The Good News From the Front Lines on Memory Research.


NAMING NATURE is a brilliant and fascinating book examining the scientific struggle to make sense of the vast diversity of the living world. Although I have been a taxonomist for sixty years, I learned new things about people like Linnaeus and Darwin, and enjoyed reading about revolutions in which I played a peripheral role. NAMING NATURE will be enjoyed by every biologist, birder, and general nature lover
-- Paul R. Ehrlich, Bing Professor of Population Studies, Stanford and author of The Population Bomb, The Birders Handbook and Human Natures


The world will never be more diverse than it is right now--and this is a wonderfully evocative and entertaining guide to the human attempt to make sense of all that insane and gorgeous abundance.
- Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature and Deep Economy


Naming Nature creatively breaks new ground, asking us just why we really need to name plants and animals, and how various systems of naming may or may not help us relate more deeply to the world around us. Not only is the writing exquisite, but it is such a pleasure to read a book based on deep thinking about biosystematics and ethno biology from someone who knows her topics well rather than one that merely offers pat answers. This book will reshape your own relationship with the natural world.
--Gary Nabhan, author of The Forgotten Pollinators, Cross-Pollinations and Where Our Food Comes From



This is such a smart and such a lovely book that I wish I had written it. In "Naming Nature", Carol Kaesuk Yoon explores both wild diversity of life on Earth and our very human need to give structure to the world around us. The result is a fascinating history of science, an illumination of nature's improbable exuberance, and a thoughtful evaluation of occasional conflict between man-made definitions and living reality. As I said, I wish I had written it."
-Deborah Blum, author of Ghost Hunters: William James and the
Scientific Search for Life After Death"



To name is to know is to be able to love, and that is biodiversity's last best hope: Such is the thesis of this compelling, quirky, beautifully written guide to our need to classify the world around us.  Carol Kaesuk Yoon warns that as we lose our ability and interest to name the living world -- as we abandon those tasks to scientists -- we lose the living world itself.  But this is not another environmental doomsday scenario book. Instead, Yoon inspires us to get out there and see (and name!) the world anew.
- David Takacs, author of Philosophies of Paradise: The Idea of Biodiversity



Carol Kaesuk Yoon's new book 'Naming Nature' is a compelling voyage into both our psyche and our history as to how and why we try to classify nature. Skillfully intertwining such diverse strands as that of E.O. Wilson, Lewis Carroll, cladism, and the ethno mycology of New Guinea, the author weaves a rich tapestry for those interested in the world in which we live and our place in it - in other words, everyone!
--Mark J. Plotkin, author of The Tale of A Shaman’s Apprentice, and President, Amazon Conservation Team




Naming Nature is rich with prickly characters, from Linnaeus to Ernst Mayr to Willi Hennig, who animate the fascinating story of how science has learned to find a deep orderliness within life's diversity.
-- David Quammen, author of The Reluctant Mr. Darwin and Song of the Dodo



As we interact with nature, we use our distinctly human capacities to create names and categories for the creatures we encounter.  Often this exercise becomes the fodder for cold scientific analysis and debate.  In this lively account, Kaesuk-Yoon forces us to encounter our fundamental humanity as she explores  the most basic, and most important, branches of science.
-Neil Shubin, author of YOUR INNER FISH: A Journey Through the 3.5 billion Year History of the Human Body.



Carol Yoon charmingly reviews progress in taxonomy, the science of naming nature. Along the way, she reveals how personal familiarity with nature has been increasingly offloaded to experts. Yoon shows how the counterintuitive findings from science undercut people's confidence in their own observations, leading them to abdicate their ownership of nature to a cloistered intelligentsia. She concludes that by returning to ordinary language, people can reclaim their joy and personal familiarity with nature. Yoon's Naming Nature is a brilliant and readable essay.
-Joan Roughgarden, Stanford biologist and author of Evolution's Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People and The Genial Gene: Deconstructing Darwinian Selfishness



Carol Yoon brings a fascinating story and a surprising perspective to
light via this rich tale of the contentious history of taxonomy, the
oldest scientific discipline. Specialization in the sciences, just as in
music and art, is a two -edged sword. While we get experts able to
perform at the highest levels of an increasingly sophisticated craft,
the rest of us are increasingly alienated from participation. In the
context of naming nature, Yoon argues that there is a real cost to such loss of engagement--we lose touch with nature and ourselves-a tradeoff in depth of personal umwelt we would do well to re-consider. Her tale reveals how humans classify objects, the first step in explaining and understanding our surroundings, as well as the scientific wars fought and won. We must know nature to love it, and oft-changing and off-putting naming conventions do little to foster familiarity. Yoon's argument underscores the need for a universally accessible fount of information-- complete with all known synonyms-- on species, a global, all inclusive Encyclopedia of Life.
--Brian D. Farrell, professor and curator at Harvard University’s Museum of Comparative Zoology