This fascinating book is a firsthand account of the adventures of an ornithological field team studying long-tailed finches in outback Australia. In 1991, Nancy Burley, a noted behavioral ecologist, and her husband, Richard Symanski, went to Australia with their one-year-old son and four American students hired as field assistants and babysitter. The social relationships and problems that developed among these individuals in confined and exotic settings and the scientific discoveries that did--and did not--take place form the heart of the book.
Symanski begins by telling how he and his...

Taking sharp aim at complacent geography scholars, this irreverent book turns the world of academic geography upside down. The author joins with his alter ego, the incorrigible Korski, to draw fire from his own personal and professional experience, exposing a discipline soiled by cerebral litter.