One of the columns he wrote, about why animals never evolved wheels, caught the attention of the editors at Discover magazine.

“But I just could not develop the skill of writing a good news story then, in college, and so that didn’t work out.”īut years later, Diamond began writing columns for the “News and Views” section of Nature, a weekly science magazine. By the time he went to college, at Harvard, he enjoyed writing enough to apply for a spot in the press office. His interest in writing began much earlier, when his studies at Boston’s Roxbury Latin School included writing a weekly independent composition. That’s how I got interested in nature seriously.” For me, it was love at first sight and I’ve been returning ever since.

“We said to ourselves, ‘What’s the most wild and adventurous place that we young and unattached bachelors could go to?’ And so we cooked up a trip to New Guinea. New Guinea forests are mostly not coniferous, but they’re still forests, and so ever since my childhood summers, forests seem to me the right place to be.”ĭiamond’s affection for New Guinea began in 1964 when he and a college friend decided they wanted to take a trip to the tropics. I think that’s also part of the reason why I love New Guinea. “I imprinted on those places where I spent one or two months of the year, and so to me, still, the ideal place to be is a coniferous forest, like New England in the summer. But the family spent time each summer in New Hampshire, around Lake Winnipesaukee, and in Maine on Bar Harbor Island. His parents were “city dwellers”-from New York-and he grew up in suburban Boston. Diamond, a prolific author who was awarded the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for his book Guns, Germs and Steel, was not born into a nature-revering family.

Author jared diamond