Boyd Norton is no stranger to risks. Since blowing up a nuclear reactor he has had close encounters with charging grizzly bears, poisonous snakes (he was bitten once), crazy bush pilots, snorting Cape buffaloes, rhino and elephant poachers, whitewater rapids, vertical mountain walls, Borneo headhunters, mountain gorillas, and Moscow taxi drivers. He is the author/photographer of seventeen books. Two of his books are collaborations—Baikal: Sacred Sea of Siberia (Sierra Club, 1992) with Peter Matthiessen and Divided Twins: Alaska and Siberia (Viking Press, 1988) with Yevgeny Yevtushenko. This excerpt is a memoir-in-progress about a life with neutrons and wilderness.
Fall 2016: The Poetics of Science
Excerpt from Tickling the Dragon’s Tail: How I Once Blew Up a Nuclear Reactor and Went on to Save the World’s Wild Places
One of the legendary stories of the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos was about famed physicist Richard Feynman. A risky experiment had been proposed by physicist Otto Frisch, which entailed […]