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Zusatztext PRAISE FOR TINKERING WITH EDEN "You really can't fool Mother Nature, as Kim Todd vividly shows in her fascinating, cautionary first book."-- The New York Times Book Review "Todd uncovers a Greek tragedy of human heedlessness . . . [A] beautifully written natural history."-- Outside Informationen zum Autor Kim Todd is the author of four books about science and history, including Chrysalis: Maria Sibylla Merian and the Secrets of Metamorphosis and Tinkering with Eden: A Natural History of Exotic Species in America . Her most recent, Sensational, the Hidden History of America’s “Girl Stunt Reporters ,” was published by HarperCollins in April 2021. Her work has appeared in Orion , Sierra Magazine , Smithsonian , High Country News , and several Best American Science and Nature Writing anthologies, among other places, and has received the PEN/Jerard Fund Award and the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award. She is currently on the creative writing MFA faculty at the University of Minnesota, where she teaches literary nonfiction. Learn more and get in touch at www.kimtodd.net. Klappentext I THINK VAUGHN IS GOING TO USE SOME ART ELEMENTS ON THE BACK COVER TOO Praise for CHRYSALIS "In this revolutionary biography of Maria Merian, Kim Todd has rewritten history to include this woman of courage, dedication and genius, and in doing so has turned an old notion or two on its head. This is an earth-shaking book."--Janisse Ray, author of ECOLOGY OF A CRACKER CHILDHOOD "Kim Todd gives wings to the life of the artist/naturalist Maria Merian. A lovely and exhilarating book." - Deirdre McNamer, author of MY RUSSIAN Leseprobe CHAPTER ONE The Most Noble of All the Worms How many creatures walking on this earth Have their first being in another form? —Ovid, Metamorphoses Frankfurt am Main, 1647– 1665 A nother pupa, another time. Cocoon walls, thick with silk, wrapped their contents tight. Inside, the organs altered. The mouth disappeared. The white body darkened, turned dusky gold. Pressed between the wings, the antennae waited to sense the morning. At a table near dawn, the girl watched and gripped her paintbrush. She’d woken early enough this day to catch the adult moth dissolving the silk strands and pushing them aside. Other times she got up too late or waited and waited, grown cramped from sitting still. How to capture the thin threads swathing the oval, the precise folds of the pupa? Once out, the moth changed so fast, shifting from second to second as it dried. It was hard to move her wrist quickly enough to make the black lines of scrabbling legs. This pale silkworm, its dowdy moth, drew her in. At thirteen, she may have felt her own innards alter, traced a finger over a face now unfamiliar in the mirror. It’s the time when the young most anticipate a spectacular transformation, hoping for a future saturated with color, shimmering with iridescence. But she had chosen to focus not on some gaudy butterfly, but this dowdy little insect. Those strands, so thin, so strong, that wrapped the cocoon, tied the worm to stockings, and skirts and hair ribbons, bound it to daily life. It was a practical choice, though no one could call this activity practical. She labeled the silkworm “the most useful and noble of all worms and caterpillars.” Between chores, she cared for her subjects. In the chill of early spring when the mulberry leaves were not yet in bloom, she raised the caterpillars on lettuce. She built them cone-shaped paper houses where they could spin their cocoons, covering the insects if a storm threatened. Thunder made them ill. So many things could go wrong: a room too cold, leaves wet and rotten, eggs that collapsed and failed to hatch, a clumsy finger brushing scales off the wings. But eventually...
