For more than twenty-five years, paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould wrote a column called 'The View of Life' for Natural History magazine. More than thirty entries from that column comprise this collection, which covers topics from dinosaurs to baseball and nearly everything in between related to natural history and evolution. Among the essays included here are 'A Humongous Fungus among Us,' 'The Late Birth of a Flat Earth,' 'Poe's Greatest Hit,' 'The Smoking Gun of Eugenics,' 'A Special Fondness for Beetles,' and 'Can We Complete Darwin's Revolution?'