My forthcoming book was officially approved for publication by UChicago Press earlier this fall. I just finished revising the text on Oct. 22. So it’s definitely starting to feel real! I’m very excited about it, and I hope you are too.
The one-sentence elevator pitch for the book is that it’s about harnessing diversity of ideas, goals, and approaches in ecological research. But that’s just one way of looking at my book. My book, like Walt Whitman, contains multitudes.* So in the spirit of another American poet, Wallace Stevens, here are thirteen ways of looking at my book:
It’s about what ecologists can learn from ecology about how to study ecology
It’s a popular science book, but for scientists
It’s a guided tour of ecology
It’s like A Critique For Ecology, except that it’s mostly not critique. So, not actually all that much like A Critique For Ecology. But it’s even less like any other ecology book.
It’s like a graduate-level ecology textbook, but with unconventional topic coverage and organization
It’s like a bunch of blog posts, woven together. Even though most of the book is new material, not old blog posts.
It’s low key science studies
It’s low key philosophy of science
It discusses many papers, on a huge range of topics (while also recognizing that there’s much that it omits)
It cites Meghan, Brian, William Gibson, Isaiah Berlin, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Cecilia Payne, and Nate Silver. Not all in the same paragraph, though.
The opening line is killer.
For better or worse**, it is exactly the book that you’d expect me to write
It is a fun, easy read
It would make for a great graduate seminar
You should buy it
Yes, I know that’s more than thirteen
I was going to close with a poll on whether, when it comes to marketing my book, I am a genius, or a super-genius. But I decided that a poll would be superfluous, because it’s just totally obvious that I am a book marketing super-genius. No strained reference to Walt Whitman or Wallace Stevens has ever failed to sell fewer than 1,000,000 books.
In the comments, feel free to ask me questions about the book. Preferably questions like “How many copies will be printed? Because I want to buy all of them.” 🙂
*Sadly, it was only after finishing the revisions that I realized I hadn’t worked a Whitman quote into the book. Oh well, too late now.
**It’s surely some of both, though hopefully mostly the former.