Few writers have attempted to explore the natural history of a particular animal by adopting the animal's own sensibility. But Verlyn Klinkenborg-with his deeply empathetic relation to the world around him-has done just that, and done it brilliantly, in Timothy; or Notes of an Abject Reptile.This is the story of a tortoise whose real life was observed by the eighteenth-century English curate Gilbert White, author of The Natural History of Selborne....