Referring to ants, Wilson once said, 'Karl Marx was right, socialism works, it is just that he had the wrong species.' He writes elsewhere, 'Human beings must have an epic, a sublime account of how the world was created and how humanity became part of it. As a Boy Scout who soars right up to Eagle, he learns how to take notes of everything he sees.

It becomes his secret place and he bicycles into it every chance he gets to escape his family. Because the ideas are those of Edward Osborne Wilson - the world's leading myrmecologist (student of ants), Harvard University's illustrious and influential researcher (sociobiology, biodiversity), evolutionary theorist (consilience, biophilia), conservationist, humanist and populist writer (Tom Wolfe famously called him 'a new Darwin, or perhaps I should say an updated Darwin, since no one ever believed more religiously in Darwin than he does') - his fictional account of an Alabama backwoods boy who grows up to be a Harvard lawyer fighting to save the woodlands of his childhood has power and importance disproportionate to the genial, folksy, frequently clumsy storytelling of an octogenarian first-time novelist.Īs a child, Raphael (Raff) Cody falls in love with his parents' favourite picnic spot in the West Nokobee Tract at the edge of William Ziebach National Forest between Greenville and Mobile in the East Gulf Coastal Plain of Alabama.

Anthill by edward o wilson