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English Professor and Author David Toomey's New Book, "Kingdom of Play," Featured in The Atlantic

Launch party for the book to be held March 28 at Amherst Books

March 13, 2024 Academics

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David Toomey and book Kingdom of Play

Kingdom of Play: What Ball-Bouncing Octopuses, Belly-Flopping Monkeys, and Mud-Sliding Elephants Reveal About Life Itself, the latest book by English professor and critically acclaimed science writer David Toomey set to release on March 19, was profiled in a recent article in The Atlantic. 

The article—"Do Animals Have Fun?" by Sallie Tisdale—explores the same central themes in Toomey's book, diving into the science of evolutionary explanations for animal play and whether it brings them joy.

Tisdale writes: 

In the end, the belief that animals are no less complex and mysterious than humans prevails in Kingdom of Play. Toomey understands that if we always reduce play to some form of utility, we are returning animals to the status of automatons. As the book winds down, his own enjoyment of the subject comes to the fore."

In addition to the book's feature in The Atlantic, Kingdom of Play was also reviewed in the Scientific American, which called it, "Delightful . . . Toomey makes a compelling case that not only does play offer advantages in natural selection and serve as a potential generator of animal evolution, but the innovation it sparks may even help primates like us influence our own evolution."

Toomey will celebrate the release of Kingdom of Play with a launch party on Thursday, March 28, at 6 p.m. at Amherst Books, 8 Main Street, Amherst, Mass. 

Toomey holds a PhD in English Literature from the University of Virginia, where his dissertation was Dreams of Different Things: The Experience of Schizophrenia as Represented in Journals, Clinical Accounts and Fiction of the Modernist Period. 

At UMass Amherst, he is co-director of the English Department’s Professional Writing and Technical Communication Program. He regularly teaches courses within the program, as well as the undergraduate courses Advanced Expository Writing, Early British Literature and Culture, and Bible Myth, Literature & Society. He has taught the graduate seminars Cosmological Revolutions and 17th and 18th Century British Literature, Darwin, Freud, Einstein and Literary Culture, and The Bible as Literature.

His most recent writing, including the latest, Kingdom of Play, may be categorized as science for lay audiences. His book Weird Life: the search for life that is very, very different from our own (W.W. Norton, 2013) was longlisted for the 2014 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award, shortlisted for Physics World Book of the Year for 2013, and named an “Editor’s Choice” by the New York Times Sunday Book Review. It appeared in Spanish translation from Biblioteca Buridán in 2015 and Japanese translation from Hakuyosha Publishing in 2016. 

His book The New Time Travelers: a journey to the frontiers of physics (W.W. Norton, 2007) was among ten nonfiction books named “new and notable” by Scientific American in 2007, and listed among the “Best Sci-Tech Books 2007” by Library Journal. It appeared in Spanish translation from Biblioteca Buridán in 2008. 

Other books are Stormchasers: the Hurricane Hunters and their Flight into Hurricane Janet (W.W. Norton, 2002), Amelia Earhart's Daughters: the Wild and Glorious Story of American Women Aviators from World War II to the Dawn of the Space Age, co-authored with Leslie Haynsworth (William Morrow, 1998), and Scientific and Technical Communication in Theory, Practice and Policy, second author with James Collier (Sage, 1996).

Article posted in Academics for Faculty , Staff , Current students , and Public

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