FOR those whose only image of William Beebe is a bald head poking out of the bathysphere that took him 914 metres beneath the Atlantic in 1934, Carol Gould’s biography will be an eye-opener. Beebe not only lunched with Rudyard Kipling, A. A. Milne and Teddy Roosevelt, he was also the creator of community ecology with his famous study of “one-quarter of a square mile of jungle” in the former British Guiana.
The list of accomplishments of this “naturalist” who never earned a college degree seems endless: while director of the Bronx Zoo, New York, he wrote two dozen books,…
