Book review: The Making of a Biogeographer: the life of Jack Briggs

Abstract

ISSN 1948-6596 news and update family. With new sequence data and new tech- nologies becoming available, some parts of the presented phylogenies will certainly change. Some of the open questions will hopefully be solved soon, but I strongly believe that it will take a long time before this book is outdated. The book can be ordered for 110 US$ from http://www.compositae.org/, and by e-mail to compositaebook@gmail.com. All profits go to the International Association for Plant Taxonomy (IAPT) (http://www.botanik.univie.ac.at/iapt/). Kadereit, J.W., & Jeffrey, C. (2007) Asteraceae. In The families and genera of vascular plants, vol. 8 (ed by K. Kubitzki). Springer, Berlin. References Edited by Joaquin Hortal Hanno Schaefer Division of Biology, Imperial College London, UK e-mail: hanno.schaefer@imperial.ac.uk http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/people/ hanno.schaefer Bremer, K. (1994) Asteraceae: Cladistics & Classifica- tion. Timber Press, Portland. book review The Making of a Biogeographer: the life of Jack Briggs A Professorial Life. An Autobiographical Account, by John C. Briggs Xlibris Corporation, 2009, 272 pp. ISBN 13 (TP): 978-1-4415-8881-4 http://academicautobiography.com/ With “A Professorial Life” John (Jack) Briggs, an icon in the field of Biogeography, follows the ad- vice of Renaissance sculptor Benvenuto Cellini, who suggested that every person should write their autobiography. At the outset Briggs defines his autobiography as an interlace between profes- sional and personal life that feed on each other and can’t be separated. Since he is turning 90 this year, Briggs has experienced enough changes both in the discipline and in society to have material for an insightful book. His book broadly covers three main areas: his personal life, a career in academia, and his main scientific contributions. His personal life is entertaining. I found his accounts of early fishing and hunting in wild California to be full of nostalgic charm. His short foray in the Air Force during WWII, followed by some hairy flights and landings in people’s fields in his personal airplane soon after the war, brought back a long lost sense of adventure. Jack Briggs married four times (his first wife married fifteen times!) and has nine chil- dren and many grandchildren. Thus his diatribes denouncing the poor state of education in the US, and his writing of a scientific children’s book (A Mesozoic Adventure, which incidentally my kids thoroughly enjoyed) clearly come from personal experience and frustration. A recurrent theme in the book is his interest in real estate. I quickly lost count of the number of houses that the Briggs household moved in and out of, bought and sold, I am wondering if Jack Briggs knows this number himself. The autobiography then moves into the sci- entific aspect of Briggs’ life. It is very interesting to try to figure out how Briggs’ career choices shaped his biogeographic thinking. As a child and young man, Briggs extensively camped and fished in Yosemite National Park, California, and later worked as a ranger at Crater Lake National Park in Oregon. His personal love of the wild streams of the Western US translated in graduate work on the ecology of trout and salmon rivers. As a graduate student at Stanford, which was then still in the intellectual footsteps of David Starr Jordan, he learned to know fishes in the best possible place to do so. As was common then, while being a broad systematist, he also specialized in a par- ticular group of fishes. He focused his attention on gobiesocids, or clingfishes, a group of unique fishes with a sucking disk on their underside that, frontiers of biogeography 2.1, 2010 — © 2010 the authors; journal compilation © 2010 The International Biogeography Society