David Quammen was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1948 and was educated at Yale and Oxford universities, where he was a Rhodes scholar. He has written four novels and seven books of nonfiction including The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions, The Flight of the Iguana, Wild Thoughts from Wild Places, The Reluctant Mr. Darwin, and Natural Acts. He regularly contributes essays, columns, articles, and reviews to such publications as Esquire, Rolling Stone, Outside, Harper’s, and The New York Times Book Review. Mr. Quammen is a frequent writer and traveler for National Geographic magazine and lives in Bozeman, Montana.