Word: pandas
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...Gracie did not get much sleep on their 1941 honeymoon. Explains Walter, now 80: "It was this darned woodpecker. He made a terrible racket and ruined the roof of our cottage." Unable to silence the pest, Lantz made him immortal-by introducing the creature into one of his Andy Panda cartoons. "Universal Studios told me I ought to have my head examined," he recalls. "They said he's noisy, raucous, obnoxious; he'll never go." They were right, except on that last point. Now in his 40th year, Woody Woodpecker remains a star of screen and television. Children...
...Panda's Thumb. Stephen Gould combines a feeling of childlike wonderment with pedagogical earnestness and leads his readers on a fascinating and entertaining field trip through the largest natural history museum of them all--the world. Instead of exhibits, though, Gould presents us with a collection of essays that bring to life the subjects of natural history better than any reconstructed dinosaur of stuffed dodo...
Gould has selected uniformly amusing and informative illustrations for his theme. In the essay that gives the book its title, he describes a thumb-like appendage on a panda's paw that helps it strip the leaves from bamboo shoots, a panda's favorite meal. The depiction of the panda in its natural habitat typifies the light yet information-filled passages that make this book eminently readable for the non-scientist...
...Down's syndrome, and a mite that dies before it is born, in addition to discussions of cartoon characters--remains entertaining throughout in large part because of Gould's style. He allows us to share his feelings of excitement and wonder about the world of natural history. In "The Panda's Thumb" essay, for example, Gould tells us of his childhood adoration of pandas and how delighted he was "when the first fruits of our thaw with China went beyond ping pong to the shipment of two pandas to the Washington zoo. I went and watched with appropriate...
Today more and more scientists seem to be matching their talent for experimentation with a surprising gift for exposition. One of them is a Harvard paleontologist named Stephen Jay Gould, 39, author of two pellucid collections of essays on evolution (Ever Since Darwin, The Panda's Thumb). Another is Dr. Lewis Thomas, 66, whose humane writings on biology and medicine in the pages of the New England Journal of Medicine became the basis for two bestsellers (The Lives of a Cell, The Medusa and the Snail). Others include Physicists Jeremy Bernstein, 50, a regular contributor to The New Yorker; Robert...