Take another trip... 
The author of Keith County 
Journal continues his elegiac 
observations of the diverse 
inhabitants of Keith County, 
Nebraska, including the tiger 
beetle, the Rocky Mountain toad, 
the Lonnie Paul Dinkle. As the 
Boston Globe observed of his 
earlier work, “This is not simply 
a book about nature. It is about 
life.” Illustrated, $10.95 
BACK 
IN KEITH 
COUNTY 
St. Martin’s Press 
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N Y 10010 
Monuments of Time 
The Kawai piano is perfection ob- 
tained by the hand of time. Your 
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man and his well-deserved extinction. 
This part of the book is drably printed in 
black and uremic yellow on a matte 
paper. We turn the page and find our- 
selves in a four-color fantasy printed on 
glossy stock, full of gorgeous landscapes 
and delightful paintings of charmingly 
named animals: flapjacks, gholes, 
spickles, wakkas. The effect is exactly 
like the transition from Kansas to Oz in 
the old MGM Wizard of Oz (Dixon, 
remember, is a filmmaker on the side), 
and the subliminal message is similar: 
Oz, witches and all, is better than Kan- 
sas, and a fantasy world without intelli- 
gent life is better than a real world full 
of human beings. 
This is the main reason why I found 
After Man so disturbing. For all its 
lovely artwork (including several witty 
parodies of Audubon and his succes- 
sors), unflagging inventiveness, and 
genuine educational value, the book 
oozes a black misanthropy that is ulti- 
mately self-destructive. Asked in a re- 
cent television interview why he had 
omitted intelligent life from his zoology 
of the future, Dixon replied, “I take the 
line that Nature won’t make that mis- 
take twice.” The same moral is con- 
veyed in Dixon’s book: sentience is a 
blind alley, and thinking leads to extinc- 
tion. This sentiment seems out of place 
in a book that aims to teach nonscien- 
tists the principles of evolutionary biol- 
ogy. Telling your audience that science 
and learning are suicidal is a poor way to 
arouse their enthusiasm for learning 
something about science. Even on a su- 
perficial level, Dixon’s zoology of the 
mindless future contradicts itself, for 
the reader soon starts to wonder just 
who or what is supposed to be describing 
these animals and giving them scientific 
names — in Latin, yet — if the last scien- 
tists died fifty million years before. “The 
purrip bat,” Dixon tells us on page 46, is 
“so called because of its curious voice.” 
So called by whoml 
meet- catrJun^ ama thk. r&pci 
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