Author Birthdays: Oliver, Diamond

Fri, 09/10/2010 - 5:16pm by marshd

September 10th marks the birthday of two American writers: Mary Oliver and Jared Diamond.

Mary Oliver is an American poet, now 75 years old and still writing. She has written many books of poems, including American Primitive, which won her a Pulitzer Prize in 1984. Parts of her collection The Leaf and the Cloud were included in The Best American Poetry books of 1999 and 2000.

The collection she published in 2006, called Thirst, has been praised by many reviews, including one from Booklist, which stated: "Oliver, one of the country's most popular and highly awarded poets, presents her credo at the outset of her newest collection: My work is loving the world. The poems that follow are what readers expect from Oliver, beautifully tempered lyrics celebrating the splendor of the living world."

Author Jared Diamond is a scientist, currently at UCLA. He has won many awards for some of his books, including the dual-winning The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution And Future Of The Human Animal. This book focuses on inter-species domination (like humans over chimpanzees), as well as humans domination over other humans.

Diamond won a Pulitzer for his book Guns, Germs, and Steel: the Fates of Human Societies, which discusses Eurasian civilizations' abilities to conquer through the advantages of geography rather than biology; the book was also made into a documentary by National Geographic. Almost all of his books focus on domination in some way, except for Why Is Sex Fun?: The Evolution Of Human Sexuality, which explains the seemingly peculiar aspects and evolution of human sexuality.