Writing Naturally: A Memoir

by Bill Sargent

William Sargent, relative of the painter John Singer Sargent and son of a former governor of Massachusetts, was primed early for a career in politics, but since boyhood he was far more interested in science than in traditional forms of public service. Nonetheless, at Harvard University he declared himself a government major - a plan that gave way the day he had lunch at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology, where huge plaster casts of dinosaur tracks and the smell of formaldehyde triggered in the freshman his inborn love of nature. Sargent immediately switched from government to biology. As a science major in the 1960s, Sargent enjoyed the instruction and guidance of such luminaries as E. O. Wilson, James Watson, Jane Goodall, Louis Leakey, and Stephen Jay Gould, all pioneers in their respective fields.

Contents:
Beginnings --
Pleasant bay (1950s) --
Expanding horizons (1954-1959) --
Adolescent senescence (1960-1965) --
College --
Observing the molecular wars : my early college years (1965-1967) --
The Atlantis II (1967) --
The Simian seminars (1967-1970) --
The undergraduate years (1967-1970) --
Desecheo (1969) --
Getting started --
At sea and wet behind the ears : writing and graduate school (1970-1971) --
Cape Cod or Caracas? think global, write local! (1970-1980) --
Shallow waters (1979-1980) --
Confessions of a horseshoe crab farmer (1980-1982) --
Woods hole (1981-1990) --
Writing naturally --
Storm surge --
Hard times --
A year in the notch : using science to write about nature (1998-1999) --
Crab wars : investigative reporting (2000-2001) --
Vaccine chronicles : the book that never got published (2001-2002) --
The house on Ipswich Marsh (2003-2004).

144 pages, Hardcover

First published August 31, 2006