Edmund Blair Bolles is an American humanist, editor and versatile writer, who has produced books on travel, children’s behavior and science. Also, he is a former teacher, who served in the United States Peace Corps in Tanzania in the mid-1960's.
Background
Edmund Blair Bolles was born on May 16, 1942, in Washington, District of Columbia, United States. He is a son of Blair Bolles, a writer, and Mona (Dugas) Bolles, a journalist. Stephen Bolles, an American politician and congressman from Wisconsin, was Edmund's grandfather.
Education
In 1964, Edmund received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Washington University in St. Louis. Later, in 1966, he attained a Master of Arts degree from the University of Pennsylvania.
Career
During the period from 1966 till 1968, Edmund served as a teacher in the United States Peace Corps in Tanzania. He began his writing career in 1969, writing for newspapers, such as the Washington Post, and magazines, such as Saturday Review. In the late 1970's, Edmund wrote two travel volumes, "Animal Parks of Africa" and 'The Beauty of Africa", then followed in the 1980's with such works, as "So Much to Say: How to Help Your Child Learn to Talk" and "A Child's World".
Bolles also published two health-related works, "Learning to Live with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome' and "Relief from Chronic Backache", and a pair of neurological volumes, "Remembering and Forgetting: Inquiries into the Nature of Memory" and "A Second Way of Knowing: The Riddle of Human Perception".
In addition, Bolles served as an editor of the 1997 publication "Galileo's Commandment: An Anthology of Great Science Writing", which includes more than sixty selections from a range of notable science writers, including Francis Bacon, Marie Curie, Rachel Carson, Richard Feynman and Stephen Jay Gould. Bolles’s aim with the volume was to establish science writing as an enjoyable, as well as informative, genre.
Edmund's other works include "The Ice Finders: How a Poet, a Professor and a Politician Discovered the Ice Age", "Babel's Dawn: A Natural History of the Origins of Speech" and others.
Currently, he lives in New York City.
Views
Edmund believes, that human free will and originality are real and natural, deriving from animal memory systems.
Quotations:
"Keep this point clear: central to discovering an experience's perceptual meaning is a recognition of its identity and its individuality."
Membership
Edmund is a member of the National Association of Science Writers and National Writers Union.