Armand marie leroi biography of abraham

"[...] The Lagoon is an intellectual homage – an admiring, deeply researched and considered reconstruction of Aristotle's thinking about living things.

The effort to get inside his head seems driven by a heartfelt sympathy, a sense of wonder about life on Earth shared across 2300 years, and by the modern scientist's urge to give credit where credit is due. [...] The prose is so lively, the thinking so lucid, and the use of such devices so artful, one might not notice it all adds up to a 500-page systematic analysis of a massive, dry, sometime jumbled philosophical corpus from a profoundly alien society.

That many readers will come away entertained, and with even a slightly better understanding of Aristotle would be a major literary feat even if the book did not offer significant original contributions. [...] As compelling as Stephen Jay Gould's best work, it will long outlast most nature writing of recent years.