First, you take a bit from each of the disaster movies made in recent years, add a few current events (oil embargo, space exploration, the third world), and stir with liberal dollops of "Chariot of the Gods" type phenomena. Mix in a little soap opera, place it all on Noah's Ark afloat somewhere near the Bermuda Triangle and infest it with the "Andromeda Strain" and you have the essence of Allan Eckert's new thriller ["The HAB Theory"]. The essence and ...

Eckert's description [in "Wilderness Empire"] of the often bloody encounters between the competing forces of empire, with the Indians taking different sides at different times, offers exciting reading. However, the author's use of extrapolated "dialogue" in an effort to make his book more lively and the absence of interpretation limit the value of the account. (pp. 82-3) Irwin Polishook, "In Brief: America," in The New York Times Book Revi...

To those who critically read either of Allan W. Eckert's other naturalist books, "The Great Auk" or "The Silent Sky," the technical problems of his "Wild Season" are no surprises. Both "Great Auk" and "Silent Sky," in spite of their difficulties, at least make one pause in awe and sorrow before lonely museum displays of the auk and passenger pigeon—now extinct. Eckert experienced several essential literary problems in both &...

Nature study is full of pitfalls, Disney only knows, and it is a pleasure to report that Allan W. Eckert has avoided them all in this beautiful book about the Louisiana bayou country ["Bayou Backwaters"]. The bayou region, which has thus far escaped "development," is a richly populated stronghold of plant and animal life. Mr. Eckert builds up an evocative word-portrait of the area by letting us observe a number of its inhabitants on their daily rounds through its woods and waters...

In one of the strangest chapters of American history a boy who had long played at being an Indian became one. Marmaduke Van Swearingen, captured with his younger brother by a band of Shawnee warriors, traded his white identity for his brother's release and became totally—in fealty, in life style, in consuming hatred for the white man—an Indian…. With a precise fidelity to the facts of history, [Allan W. Eckert] has constructed a documentary novel [Blue Jacket: War Chief of the Sh...

Allan Eckert's brand of history takes some getting used to. It reads very like fiction, but is actually fact dressed up in the style of a novel. There's an intimacy in the effort which is often lacking in today's historical writing. Yet the approach poses problems. For example, he leans heavily on dialogue to tell his story, making ample use of whatever historical conversation remains in archives but also adopting the practice of what he terms "hidden dialogue"—putt...

Using the voluminous Draper manuscripts and other first-hand accounts of the winning of the West, Eckert has followed the frontiersmen from the first wondering exploration of the Ohio valley in the 1770's to the crushing of the final Indian resistance in the War of 1812. ["The Frontiersmen"] is a panoramic frontier history, crammed with incident…. Mr. Eckert makes one feel the lure of this frontier, though his writing can lapse into remarks like "The aura of fear in Spring...

What begins as a routine account of the migration to winter quarters of a flock of birds—unusual birds, it is true—develops into a tense tale of the struggle of the great auks against the forces which unwittingly combined to annihilate them as a species. The author calls [The Great Auk] a novel and rightly so: a more powerful or tragic plot can hardly be matched by anything conceived in the mind of a great writer. (p. 269) Eckert is masterful when describing incidents and places, some purely i...

[Allan W. Eckert] pays homage to a serpent of North Carolina [in The King Snake]. Physiological details … are included, but greatest emphasis is accorded the snake's repeated battles for survival. The author's skill is in evoking such interest and compassion in the reader that he actually identifies himself with the serpent. In a complete reversal of roles the reader hopes that the snake will outwit his human captor. Jane Manthorne, "The Ways of Wildlife," in ...

There has probably never been in all the world a species of bird more numerous than the passenger pigion, which moved about over the eastern half of the North American continent in the 19th century in flocks so enormous that they darkened the sun…. [How] did it happen that such a stupendous multitude was brought down?

["Incident at Hawk's Hill" is] disturbing…. The descriptions of animal habits and habitats are fascinating, and the lesson that only the fittest survive is clearly drawn—but author Eckert has done his job too well. The scenes of gratuitous and explicit violence—such as the bloody death battles between animals—end by turning the reader's stomach.

The end of the great auk as a member of the world's wildlife is told [in "The Great Auk"] as a novel. In a powerful and poetic flow [Mr. Eckert] traces the brief life of a single great auk from its hatching on Edley Island in the North Atlantic until its fatal return two years later to the same island, where it and its mate represent the last two great auks on earth. It is a compelling drama which includes rich descriptions of the teeming fish and animal life of the North Atlantic. As t...

[In] The Silent Sky we are given, in highly sentimental prose, yet another account of the last days of the Passenger Pigeon. The author prefers to describe his book as "a novel." It is written from the point of view of the Pigeons and what they endured; Mr. Eckert allows his feelings full play when describing what he imagines to have taken place; nor does he spare his readers when painting afresh the lives of persecution the birds endured…. For those who like to be harrowed by tales of ...

[The Owls of North America, a] magnificent reference book, surely the most comprehensive and handsome to date, covers all the owls known to inhabit the continent north of Mexico…. Orderly, straightforward, and detailed, the text conveys all the essential data known to ornithology in respect to these economically valuable and still mysterious birds. Peter Gardner, "Naturalist's Bookshelf: 'The Owls of North America'," in Audubon (copyright © 1974 ...

[In Wild Season] Eckert uses the same technique, a fictional approach, as that used in his two previous nature books, The Great Auk (1963) and The Silent Sky (1965). In this book he avoids the pitfall of expressing too much sympathy for the more helpless creatures and too little for the predators…. One of the finest sections of the book is Eckert's presentation of a few days of a bull snake's life and its tragic death at the hands of the worst predator—man. The book is recommende...

[Mr. Eckert] has skillfully woven newspaper and eyewitness accounts into an exceptionally exciting narrative [A Time of Terror] that moves as rapidly as the events of the disaster it describes. The horror and the suffering are relieved by descriptions of courage and inventiveness that sing of the triumph of humanity. Not since Walter Lord's A Night to Remember … has a calamitous event been so spellbindingly recreated. Purists may object to Mr. Eckert's liberal use of invented dialogue a...

["The Conquerors"] is a fascinating, albeit sometimes bloodthirsty and violent [tale]. If anything, the use of "hidden dialogue" enhances the story and one puts the book down feeling that this concession to the novel has not hurt the story one whit. In fact, history might have a wider audience if others would take Eckert's license without, of course, losing sight of [Francis] Parkman's call for "faithfulness to the truth of history." That's the ...

Mr. Eckert's folk fable of a small boy who can talk to furred and feathered friends ["Incident at Hawk's Hill"] is part of an apocrypha that has intrigued chroniclers before Romulus met Remus. It is still intriguing if you are willing to check your skepticism at the prologue, and pad along behind a 6-year-old named Ben…. Ben's interlude concerns his life with a female badger. A natural historian …, Mr. Eckert makes this formidable beast seem appealing, withou...

In 1778 Daniel Boone was charged with several counts of treason, involving his alleged collusion with the Shawnee Indians and the British. Eckert … has written a fascinating historical novel based on this trial…. The author has a keen sense of time and place, and has thoroughly researched what little is known about the trial. Mark Neyman, "The Book Review: 'The Court-Martial of Daniel Boone'," in Library Journal (reprinted from Library Journal, October ...

[Tecumseh!] treats in chronological order the career of Tecumseh, the Indian leader who tried in vain to weld all Indian tribes into one nation. The speeches are mostly declamatory and easy to project to a large audience. Except for the devotees and practitioners of Outdoor Drama, I feel it holds little general theatrical interest. Barton Wimble, "Theater: 'Tecumseh!'" in Library Journal (reprinted from Library Journal, August, 1974; published by R. R. Bowker Co. (a ...