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Life in the desert is a waiting game: waiting for rain. And in a year of drought, the stakes are especially high. John Alcock knows the Sonoran Desert better than just about anyone else, and in this book he tracks the changes he observes in plant and animal life over the course of a drought year. Combining scientific knowledge with years of exploring the desert, he describes the variety of ways in which the wait for rain takes placeÑand what happens when it finally comes. The desert is a land of five seasons, featuring two summersÑhot, dry months followed by monsoonÑand Alcock looks at the changes that take place in an entire desert community over the course of all five. He describes what...
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On 14 June 1919 – eight years before Charles Lindbergh's flight across the Atlantic – two men from Manchester took off in an open-cockpit Vickers Vimy and flew into the history books. They battled through a sixteen-hour journey of snow, ice and continuous cloud, with a non-functioning wireless and a damaged exhaust that made it impossible to hear each other. And then, just five hours away from Ireland and high above the sea, the Vimy stalled. Yesterday We Were in America is the incredible story of John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown, and how they gave hope to a post-war world that was in grave need of it.
In The Triumph of Sociobiology, John Alcock reviews the controversy that has surrounded evolutionary studies of human social behavior following the 1975 publication of E.O. Wilson's classic, Sociobiology, The New Synthesis. Denounced vehemently as an "ideology" that has justified social evils and inequalities, sociobiology has survived the assault. Twenty-five years after the field was named by Wilson, the approach he championed has successfully demonstrated its value in the study of animal behavior, including the behavior of our own species. Yet, misconceptions remain--to our disadvantage. In this straight-forward, objective approach to the sociobiology debate, noted animal behaviorist John...
When John Alcock replaced the Bermuda grass in his suburban Arizona lawn with gravel, cacti, and fairy dusters, he was doing more than creating desert landscaping. He seeded his property with flowers to entice certain insects and even added a few cowpies to attract termites, creating a personal laboratory for ecological studies. His observations of life in his own front yard provided him with the fieldnotes for this unusual book. In a Desert Garden draws readers into the strange and fascinating world of plants and animals native to Arizona's Sonoran Desert. As Alcock studies the plants in his yard, he shares thoughts on planting, weeding, and pruning that any gardener will appreciate. And wh...