Restless Energy: A Biography of William Rowan, 1891-1957

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian studies at
Concordia University, Japan Foundation Fellow 1991-92, and the author of
Margaret Laurence: The Long Journey Home and As Though Life Mattered:
Leo Kennedy’s Story.

Internationally known Canadian biologist William Rowan was an
outstanding scientist, conservationist, and wildlife artist. He was also
a sculptor and musician. The comparison that immediately presents itself
is with Ernest Thompson Seton, but Seton lacked the academic credentials
of Rowan, who founded the Department of Zoology at the University of
Alberta.

Marianne Ainley, a science historian, is currently the principal of the
Simone de Beauvoir Institute at Concordia University, Montreal. Her
first book, Despite the Odds: Essays on Canadian Women and Science,
looked at Canadian women scientists from a historical and contemporary
perspective. Restless Energy is her first biography.

She writes of this unusual and talented artist-cum-scientist with
sympathy and insight. As with any good biographer, Ainley’s goal is to
ungrave the man, to show him in his entirety. She finds his life to be
one of extremes and contradictions, as he moved from a youthful life of
relative luxury in Europe to roughing it in Alberta. Ainley also
addresses the effects of Rowan’s intense involvement with his work on
his spouse, and the ways in which the experience of educated immigrant
men and women in the West differed from one another.

This biography will interest ornithologists, conservationists,
educators, and historians of science in Canada. Ainley catches Rowan’s
complexity and flare in this well-researched study.