The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes

The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science
by Richard Holmes
Blackstone Audio, 2008
22 discs, unabridged

This book is phenomenal, and therefore I'm not sure how I'm going to talk about it without gushing unscientifically all over the blog. One looks at 22 discs of what is essentially science biography (though much, much more than that) and quails a little at the task one has set oneself, but if I didn't love exactly every minute of it, it was close. This book is extremely well-written and lends itself to listening, though I think I will eventually re-read as well, since there were quotes and details that I know I have forgotten due to being in a car and not being able to stop to write things down.

For a brief summary, to help me put my thoughts in order: this book takes us, time-wise, from Captain Cook's voyage to view the Transit of Venus from Tahiti to that fateful voyage of the Beagle, with one Charles Darwin along as ship's naturalist. This book is described in some places as a book that delves into the lives specifically of astronomer Sir William Herschel and chemist Sir Humphry Davy, both names which are hopefully at least vaguely familiar to most people. I would say that in addition it is framed by the extraordinary life and career of Sir Joseph Banks, who was a self-financed naturalist aboard Cook's ship the Endeavour and went on to become one of the British Royal Society's greatest presidents, presiding over that body for 41 years.

With Banks' life and Royal Society presidency framing the book, we do spend a lot of time with William Herschel and even more with William's sister Caroline - whom, I am horrified to say, I had even not heard of - and then subsequently Davy, whom I knew of mostly as the inventor of the Davy Safety Lamp, that ingenious mining lamp that saved many a coal miner from a horrible fate. Turns out I had a lot to learn about Romantic Science.

Holmes makes a strong case, and makes it explicit in his Epilogue, that part of understanding the history of science is understanding the people who shaped science, not just listing their discoveries or theories. The term "scientist" didn't even exist until after the 1830s, and even as it started to emerge was incredibly controversial (attached, as it was, very provocatively, with the term "atheist," though it was also attached to "economist" and "chemist" and the like.) Therefore, understanding the major players and the major achievements in this tremendously exciting and fertile pre-modern period is tremendously important when we're trying to understand how we got where we are today.

So, biography: not one of my favourite genres. I tend to spend a lot of time wondering how the heck the biographer knows So-and-So was thinking That when This happened, particularly if So-and-So didn't leave a lot of documentation behind. Luckily for us, the So-and-Sos of the Romantic period in Britain tended to leave heaps of documentation behind: letters, lab notes, journals, published works, even memoirs. Holmes quotes liberally from all of these and makes connections, and occasionally includes corroborating quotations from So-and-So's friends, acquaintances, colleagues, and contemporary media (newspapers, pamphlets, even satirical and critical publications). In other words, I had no problem with the biographical portions of the book.

What I realized was a) how little I really did know about that period of history, and b) how much we knew, even back in the late 1700s. How quickly, once the voltaic battery was created, Davy started isolating and identifying elements. How soon the Herschels realized that the universe was enormous, that we were just one little planet in a universe that likely contained millions of such planets and almost certainly contained other forms of life. Think of the religious implications of this at a time when challenging accepted Christian doctrine could be deadly in Britain (Holmes mentions, briefly, the mob attack on Joseph Priestley's library and home; I believe there were a number of factors there, but religion was the big one.) The Herschels, happily, managed to avoid any such violence, despite the fact that Herschel was pretty clear on the fact that he believed there was life on the Moon. Their whole story was totally fascinating, not just because of their combined brilliance and the number and importance of the discoveries they made, but because of the relationship they had, the emotional and sometimes strained bond they shared. Apparently other Herschel biographers tend to be hard on Caroline; Holmes is mostly very sympathetic to her, providing a well-rounded picture of both siblings and their relationship. He provides a convincing argument that they felt deep affection for each other, but doesn't gloss over the fact that both had their difficult moments and unhappiness.

I think what struck me most profoundly about the whole book was that Holmes didn't just look at the lives of the scientists or their achievements, but also, so importantly, at the lives and thoughts of the literary figures who were their contemporaries: the Shelleys, Byron, Coleridge, Keats, Wordsworth, Walter Scott, and Erasmus Darwin (whose enormous poem The Botanic Garden is now firmly on my TBR), and many others to a lesser extent. One of the digression chapters, in which we veer away from the lives and accomplishments of the Herschels and Davy, is on the beginning of hot air balloons; in addition to being the most tragic chapter, for reasons that should be easy to understand, it's also one of the more amusing, thanks to a few well-chosen quotes from Sir Horace Walpole. We see that science and poetry are connected, intimately, at this period of time, though arguments about the oppositional nature of science and literature, empirical fact and creative imagination, are starting to surface as well. This splitting of science from the arts is touched on a couple of times, I think to good effect. It's a topic I find particularly interesting, especially in our society where it tends to be assumed that someone who is good at math necessarily is not at all interested in literature, and someone who loves to paint couldn't possibly give a fig about physics. Holmes even touches on one of my particular pet issues when discussing Davy: applied science versus theoretical science, and the need in a progressive society for both.

This book is absolutely well worth the time and effort. I ended it wanting to know more, which is not to say that Holmes didn't give me enough to ruminate on. The Age of Wonder is at times sad, thrilling, awe-inspring, frustrating, funny, and always, always fascinating. Holmes writes incredibly well - very clearly, with occasional dry humour, creating tension without manipulating the reader so that suddenly you're halfway through the book and it feels like you've just started it; and he manages to make everything very accessible so that even those who aren't familiar with the scientific concepts he's discussing will have no difficulty following. Highly, highly recommended.

Second Nature by Michael Pollan

Second Nature: A Gardener's Education
by Michael Pollan
Blackstone Audio, 2009 (book originally published in 1991)
8 discs, unabridged

This truly is an excellent book, deserving of the accolades it has received over the years (yes, I can even see how it might be considered "a new literary classic" as the blurb on Goodreads would have it.) It also fits quite nicely into my pattern of waiting until the garden is safely under snow before getting excited about gardening again, usually at the impetus of a book like this. I didn't agree with everything this book offers - I'll get to my objections in a moment - but I loved that I was challenged by it without being shamed, and that I can feel, even at the end, that though I do disagree with at least one of Pollan's fundamental points, this book is still incredibly valuable and powerful and necessary. Perhaps I feel this so strongly even because I disagree with it.

It starts out as a seemingly simple, straightforward gardening memoir, though Pollan tells us right off where we're going, and straightforward gardening memoir is not it. I think I would have enjoyed it even if it had stuck to that. What lifts it above, however, is that Pollan transitions between gardening memoir to philosophical tract to history to manifesto, in and out, often all four things in the same chapter. And while that might sound like an awful lot of weight for a single gardening book to bear, Pollan writes so well that we move seamlessly from philosophy to history to personal anecdote to ethics to practical gardening info without blinking. One rarely feels weighed down, even when Pollan is talking about something as weighty as the history of landscape design in Western culture or the culture of the rose, largely because of the author's enthusiasm for the subject and his wry sense of humour. Pollan is fascinated by each subject he turns his pen to; the reader (or listener, in my case) is drawn along for the ride.

Even though he's very United States-centric (this is fair) and this book was originally published in 1991, I think Pollan's argument that we need a new environmental ethic is a very pertinent one in this decade and particularly in this country. I agree with him that the paradigms we have operated under have failed us as we operate as stewards of this planet. He suggests the "wilderness ethic" that requires complete isolation of wild places, an entirely hands-off approach, a la Thoreau, has lead us to believe that anything that is not untouched wilderness is therefore fair game for development of whatever sort we happen to feel we need, generally things like roads and suburbs. There is no middle ground. He proposes a "garden ethic" as the middle ground, a way towards a "second nature" in which human culture and wild nature can coexist, where the dichotomy of culture vs. nature no longer applies. He argues persuasively that generally gardeners already practice this garden ethic, even if they themselves don't recognize it as such.

Each chapter in the book essentially goes to reinforce this argument in one way or another. I found that the chapter in which he discusses ecological restoration to be particularly edifying; I could clearly and absolutely see his point, and found that I agreed with him more than I thought I did.

Where he did lose me, at first, and where I still disagree with him, is in his interpretation of naturalists and the wilderness. He argues that naturalists are too romantically engaged with the idea of wilderness, are too hands-off, are too anti-culture to accept that some human activity in the wilderness can be a good thing and might be a necessary thing. We are too blindly protective of our wild spaces, even to the detriment of the wild space. (He also suggests, a couple of times, that naturalists are lazy gardeners - this point, I am afraid, at least in my own experience I must concede, though in my grandmother's case I take issue.) He rails against wilderness - non-garden green spaces - as trying to encroach on human space, in fact setting up the sort of dichotomy he speaks against: nature is constantly trying to take back her own, in an indifferent, entropic sort of way. He suggests, in one of the earliest chapters, that no wild forest could ever have taught him as much about nature as his grandfather's garden did as a child.

To this I would suggest that Pollan just didn't have the right teachers, or the right role-models, for understanding how to learn from a wilderness. Were his eyes open to the right sorts of things, a forest has an awful lot to teach, has an incredible amount of value to humans. If you can walk through the forest like I can, and my mother, and my grandmother, and the way my grandfather did, and see and identify birds, and see and identify the various plants, insects, mammal tracks, lichens - if you can do this, you are never at a loss for something to learn. Every walk is different, each minute brings something new. (This is why I cannot really go for a hike for exercise purposes; I stop every few minutes to look at something.) And there is something valuable about going into a place with the mindset that doesn't involve "how do I put my human stamp on this, how do I change it [for the better]." This is not, in contrast to Pollan's suggestions, a lazy way to view nature. In fact, I think for many, it's harder to realize the patient openness of the naturalist's perspective than it is to go in and try to "fix" things.

That said, I get what Pollan is trying to say: that most landscapes, green or wild or otherwise, bear the stamp of human interference, and we'd do better to reconcile ourselves to interfering than to locking nature away to be something we only go visit on weekends, otherwise we're going to lose it entirely. I agree with that, fundamentally. I agree that wildlife management is probably necessary both for human enjoyment and for the good of the species involved. Pollan maybe should acknowledge a little louder that we don't always get it right, with our management techniques - Asian Ladybeetles, anyone? - but on the other hand, I agree too with the premise that basically what we're doing is managing nature in order to keep the planet habitable and pleasant for ourselves. Otherwise we're going to squeeze ourselves right out of this place. And the planet will do just fine once we're gone, keeping on keeping on, in the way it does. Pollan's point of view is unabashedly anthropocentric, whereas I think mine leans a little further towards viewing the species we share the planet with as having a right to exist for their own sake and not just ours, but we share a lot of common ground. In the spirit of his garden ethic, I think there's places to meet in the middle where we can come to compromises that don't devalue either point of view.

The audio is well-produced, though the CD breaks are at weird spots; but maybe it's just me who notices when a chapter starts and then a paragraph later you have to switch the CD? At any rate, Pollan reads the book himself, and is a good reader. It's nice to hear the words spoken the way the author intended them to sound. He's got a dryly humourous, self-deprecating way of reading that I think probably plays up those aspects of the text, and it works really well. Though he's serious about what he's saying, it never devolves into pedantry or self-important schlock. I wondered a time or two if reading the book would have felt like more of a slog than listening did.

As you can tell, lots of fodder for discussion and thought here. You don't have to be a gardener to enjoy this book, but you might find yourself curious to try growing something yourself. And even if you don't think that will ever happen, I think this is a valuable piece of writing as an effort to establish new ground, new ways of thinking and talking about humans and the environment. If it is so ambitious that it sometimes misses its mark, at least it tries. A brave book, and a necessary one.

Cheating Death by Dr. Sanjay Gupta

Cheating Death
by Dr. Sanjay Gupta
Wellness Central, 2009
202 pages

I do so love my adult book club. I was pretty scared of it at first, when I started running it around three years ago. I didn't know anything about book clubs. I didn't really want to read books that I thought book clubs read. Luckily, I had stumbled upon leading a book club that didn't want to read those books either. Now we read everything we can agree might be somewhat interesting.

This was certainly interesting, and those of us who are science wonks (there are thankfully a couple of us now!) really enjoyed the experience. Others were rather meh on the book, but we have come to accept that there are very few books in the world that the entire group is going to like, no matter how excellent those books may be (one recent exception: To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis.) We did have some great discussion mostly tangential to the book, regarding medical ethics.

Ah, but how did I do with it, you ask? This is indeed my blog about me, so here we go.

I quite enjoyed it for the most part, in that it was a series of interesting facts and stories well-told. Gupta knows how to tell a story, and he knows how to make statistics (which are few and far between in this book) and medical jargon accessible. His chapter about fetal surgery had me literally on the edge of my seat, my heart pounding and my mouth dry. I suspect this is more than just Gupta's ability to tell the story, though he's certainly extremely adept. But two years out from my own very medical experience with a baby that should have stayed a fetus for longer than she did, I think that I still have a lot of emotional baggage when it comes to anything involving infants and/or their parents in less-than-ideal situations. (My own is now a very speedy toddler, and doing just fine.)

I was also captivated particularly by two of the first chapters, a chapter about therapeutic hypothermia and another about CPR without the artificial respiration. I've been trying to figure out why these chapters were so much more interesting to me than the rest of the book, and I think it's because they were particularly strong at outlining the practical treatment, the case for using it, the people involved in researching it, the hurdles the treatments face to becoming accepted and then standard practice, and then people who have benefited from the treatments. Not necessarily in that order, but wound around each other in such a way as to make a good story and still deliver the facts. Many of the other chapters I found a little less captivating, though still very interesting; I think this was because of the fact that they were either about treatments or phenomena still in the very early stages of testing, or because of something that triggered the medical ethics discussion at my book club.

There are two chapters specifically -- one about a patient who was seemingly headed straight for brain death, and another about a couple of patients with cancers that should have been lethal -- that seemed... good, but not perfect. They were good, because in all fairness to Dr. Gupta, he makes sure to state that we don't quite understand what happened and that these are vanishingly rare cases (though he perhaps doesn't make either point quite strongly enough.) He makes sure they are cases that are rigorously documented, and he also seems to argue that patients and their families must fight for the best care possible. I think this is all good. The part where I got a little uncomfortable was the feeling that... well, a) most people don't have $2 million lying around or even have the hopes of raising it, to get their loved ones the best, most cutting edge treatment available; b) there is so little information on why these particular few, out of the thousands of people in similar situations or with the same conditions, were able to survive; and c) there are lots of good reasons, physically and emotionally, for not trying absolutely everything to survive when the odds are so drastically bad, and for compassionate doctors to let people know the truth rather than fidgeting around the difficult answers.

People in situations with loved ones in comas or with inoperable brain tumours are extremely vulnerable. I can't even imagine what would happen to me in one of those situations. I honestly try not to think about it too much because I am perfectly capable of making myself weep just by imagining it. I want doctors in that situation to be totally up front and honest. I don't want them to give up because their case load is so heavy, or because they don't feel up to the challenge -- one gets the impression that Dr. Gupta feels this is a problem, and if so that's worrisome -- but if they honestly and truly tell me they don't believe there is anything that can be done and also offer a good chance of a high quality of life post-treatment -- I want to know that. I want to know I can trust that information, and I want to know that I'm not prolonging pain or suffering, or going to end up with a loved one who can't swallow their own food due to brain damage that may or may not be reversible. What I'm saying is that I think there is a tendency in human nature to grasp at any straws, and I don't want to be given false hope.

This is where the ethics comes in: is it in a patient's best interest for a doctor to tell him about the one-in-a-million case who survived an extremely aggressive cancer for twelve years when given three months, with help from a treatment that he/she may not be able to get, much less benefit from? What about if that treatment is available, but might make your last three months -- maybe four or five with the treatment, maybe longer if you're really lucky -- complete hell because of side effects? Is it fair to tell the wife of the terminal coma patient that once someone did come out of it, and walks around with a normal life treating his own patients at a rehab centre today, and no one knows why or exactly what happened? (What wife in their right mind would pull the plug after that? Not me.) Could you live with the what-if?

Which is not to say that Sanjay Gupta shouldn't write about those things. These are cases we should be studying. I just wish that in his effort to popularize the information, and to gently suggest that people advocate better for their own health care, he had also made it more clear that these are such rare outliers, that there isn't some sort of treatment plan that your loved one just isn't getting because of physician stubbornness or laziness, or government red tape. I think that having the information -- knowing, for example, that the brain is an amazingly plastic organ that can totally reorganize itself, given the chance and lots of time to heal -- is crucial, because it contributes to a patient being able to have a full and complete discussion with health professionals. On the other hand, I think suggesting that the problem is that doctors give up too easily, as one of his subjects seems to, is going a bit too far.

I'm not even going to get into some of my other thoughts related to the chapter on near death experiences (aside from the thought that I wasn't quite sure what it was doing in the book, other than it had to do with death) wherein I wish to discuss, as related to Karen Armstrong's A Short History of Myth, whether or not there are places science can't always provide all the answers. Pretty conflicted on this question, too, frankly. I was a bit surprised to find myself on the "I am not sure I want to know the mechanics of this" side of the line.

So if nothing else, this book gave me an awful lot to think about. The reading experience was easy and mostly pleasant, fascinating and a bit like brain candy for a science junkie like me. It's very clear to see why Sanjay Gupta is considered one of the best popularizers of medical science in the English language. Recommended, but maybe don't swallow Gupta's enthusiasm without a grain or two of salt.

The New Noah by Gerald Durrell

The New Noah
by Gerald Durrell
Viking Press, 1964 (originally published in 1955)
223 pages

This was an odd one, in that I started reading it and thought two things: first, I've read about these trips before, and not when I was a kid, but rather more recently; and second, the last time I read these, they were written better. It was weird. And then I read the dust jacket, and realized that the advertising was all right there -- these were, indeed, retellings of previous adventures, but primarily aimed at kids. Once I had that all sorted, I could enjoy the book for what it was. Sort of.

I believe I have mentioned before a number of things I like about Gerald Durrell's writing -- his enthusiasm for nature, his desire to share the quirks and amazing things about the animals he meets, and especially his eloquence when it comes to describing settings, and his sharp and self-deprecating sense of humour. Some of that was still in evidence here, but in taking his "best" stories from the earlier books and editing them for a younger audience, we really only got the first two, with rare glimpses of the third and fourth -- he's telling animal stories, and he's shortened them, and they're considerably less incisive and/or amusing than their counterparts written for adults. They don't sparkle in the same way. The language is simpler, the stories shorter, the sense of adventure and danger and occasionally sorrow or outrage just doesn't show up. Chumly the Chimp (remember him?) makes an appearance and gets most of a chapter -- an unusual thing for any single animal in this book -- but the sadness of the story has vanished. Chumly's ignoble and tragic end isn't mentioned, isn't even alluded to. Perhaps this was considered too distressing for children to hear? Durrell uses this volume as a bit of a platform for discussing the life of an animal collector, but doesn't quite hit the same note that the previous three do: the acknowledgement that collecting fauna for zoos is as much hard work, pain, disappointment, and frustration as it is excitement and success. The book is significantly poorer for the lack of balance and depth.

It is possible that this book would be a better entree to Durrell's oeuvre. I think because I am familiar with his better stuff -- his "real" books, as it were -- this was not a terribly good choice for me.

Complaints aside, it's still fun to read these stories, truncated and disjointed as they are, and it's a very fast read. The stories are short and amusing even without the sparkle of wit and vivid description, and the little bits on his trips to Guiana, Argentina, and Paraguay have certainly whet my appetite for the next book in my quest to read all his autobiographical animal tales. Though it also became clear to me that I've read The Drunken Forest before -- I remember the story about Amos the Anteater well, including the bit where the gaucho's wife rides out on the back of the draft bull to pick up the aforementioned creature. And the tale about the musical capybara was one of the better and funnier tales in the book.

Only recommended if you haven't got any other Durrell to read, and absolutely need a fix. I suppose if you wanted to get a kid an early Durrell book that didn't include any unpleasant colonial English white male overtones, you might do well with this, too. The stories focus on the animals almost exclusively, so some of the parts that are not so desirable about his earlier books are absent here. However, as an adult reader, too much of the wonder and beauty and balance of his first books is absent too; I won't feel the need to read this one again.

Other Durrell books reviewed here so far:
1. The Overloaded Ark
2. Three Singles to Adventure
3. The Bafut Beagles

Bellwether by Connie Willis

Bellwether
by Connie Willis
Bantam Spectra, 1996
196 pages

Have you ever had that weird thing happen where something you've read or heard in one part of  your life connects randomly and neatly with something in a completely different part of your life? For example, I finished reading Bellwether and then CBC's The Current had a major piece on the ethics of corporate policies preventing the hiring of smokers the very next morning. It was startling. It was also very, very cool to see how prescient Willis in fact is. And it gave me a whole different perspective on the real-life issue. And hearing people discuss the real-life issue gave me a bit of a different perspective on the book, too.

I adore To Say Nothing of the Dog. I was therefore very keen to get to this book at some point, and I was kind of feeling stuck with my reading. Darla had reviewed it not long ago, so it was on my radar. And my local library had this available as an eBook and it wasn't on hold, either. And like To Say Nothing of the Dog, this book is an ideal combination for me: amusing and not totally serious about itself, but with some serious intellectual meat and chock-full of literary references. Even better, this book is steeped in the poetry of Robert Browning and science lore.

Sandra Foster, our first-person narrator, is a sociologist and statistician working for a company named HiTek. She researches fads, and is currently trying to find the source of the women's hair-bobbing fad of the 1920s, a task she likens to the historical task of trying to find the source of the Nile -- but more difficult. In addition to her research project, she is coping with a hopelessly awful interdepartmental assistant, attempting to discover the secret of a chaos theorist coworker who seems to be totally immune to fads, and trying to rescue classic novels and poetry from being discarded from the local library due to lack of popularity.

There is not a lot at stake here, except for perhaps Sandra's funding and therefore job, and the extreme long-shot odds of winning a Neibnitz Grant, the most prestigious and lucrative scientific award around. Sandra is an engaging narrator, taking us on wonderful, erudite tangents that circle around to the relevant; sharp, funny, and sarcastic. So it becomes quite important to us that she get her funding, that she find the source of the fad, that she is happy. It is impossible not to root for her, even when she is a bit clueless (very rare) or a bit prickly (not quite so rare). It's also hard not to root for her because the things she's up against are often totally ludicrous.

If I had one complaint, and it's not even really a complaint so much as an observation, I don't think this book is quite as subtle as To Say Nothing of the Dog. (I know, I know, I keep comparing, and it's not entirely fair.) It's a short book, and the things Sandra is up against are so over-the-top it becomes almost impossible to believe that she wouldn't be able to overcome them. Management at HiTek is an amalgam of all of the worst possible things about management in a large corporation. Dr. Alicia Turnbull is terribly one-dimensional. Flip, the interdepartmental assistant from Hell, is ... well, the interdepartmental assistant from Hell. She's so awful it's almost impossible to comprehend how she could even make it through a day, doing things like feeding herself and walking up and down stairs. On the other hand, she is not one-dimensional. She's actually a pretty interesting character. Awfully horrifying, but interesting.

The thing is, it's fun. It's smart fun. It's satirical fun. So I can forgive the unsubtle, larger-than-life ridiculousness of what Sandra ends up observing and coping with herself. I can forgive the dig at libraries discarding unused materials, even the really good ones, to save shelf space (because it is uncomfortably true) and I can agree that there is a disturbing analogy to be made between human behaviour and the behaviour of a flock of sheep. It's funny, and it's not, because it's true.

Suffice to say, I think you should read this. It's not long and it's totally, wonderfully worth it. I have purchased Blackout sight unseen (while I was purchasing Bellwether at the same time) and I don't do that often. But Connie Willis is turning out to be an author I want to have on my shelves. She re-reads well, if both To Say Nothing of the Dog and Bellwether are any indication -- I finished Bellwether the first time, and am already halfway through it again. I've read To Say Nothing of the Dog three times now, with a fourth coming up when I inflict it upon my long-suffering genre book club. With both there are new things to be discovered, and wonderful writing to be savoured. And you will come out the other end feeling just a little bit smarter, and maybe even a little bit wiser.

Bird Sense by Tim Birkhead

Bird Sense: What It's Like to Be a Bird
by Tim Birkhead
Bloomsbury, 2012
265 pages

I have absolutely no excuse for taking over a month to finish this book, because it's really fantastic. It should be no surprise to anyone that I might like this book; it's a popular science book about birds. Written by a scientist who really knows how to write in a way that makes the science intelligible to outsiders but not patronizing. Written by a man who really, really loves birds. This is the perfect kind of book for me.

The central question: how much do we know about a bird's senses? How do they see? Touch? Hear? Taste? Smell? How do they navigate using the earth's magnetic field? What role, if any, does emotion play in the life of a bird? Birkhead is basically giving us a sense-by-sense overview and synthesis of the research, from as far back as Aristotle to the most recent (as of publishing) fMRI studies of birds' brains. He does so in a fairly informal but also rigorous way, adding his own personal anecdotes and opinions where appropriate and necessary, but always (as any good scientist should) hedging his bets. It's essentially a massive literature review written with an eye to convincing and enlightening the layperson.

An example, though this is a fair bit more chatty than much of the book:

There is an apparent contradiction here: on one hand I'm saying that the bird's beak is much more sensitive than is generally supposed, but on the other you may be wondering about woodpeckers using their bills as an axe. How can a beak be simultaneously sensitive and insensitive? The answer is: our hands work in exactly the same way. Formed as fists, our hands become weapons, but opened flat they are capable of the most sophisticated sensitivity -- exemplified by Wilder Penfields' hugely handed homunculus. A woodpecker hacks wood using the sharp, insensitive tip of its beak; it doesn't use the much more sensitive inside of its mouth. My concern is for those wading birds like the woodcock and kiwi whose bill tip is relatively soft and incredibly sensitive. What happens if they inadvertently hit a rock by mistake when probing in the soil? Is this the human equivalent of banging your funny bone?

And there is a pleasant surprise here: Birkhead uses his opportunity to tell his audience how science works. His audience is likely fairly specific -- generally those already interested in birds, mostly, or zoology in general, or possibly psychology -- but they're not universally scientifically-minded, so he breaks down the scientific process, explicitly, in the introduction. We're also reminded constantly that scientific "truth" is, as he puts it, more accurately "truth-for-now" while we wait for someone to upset our current understanding of the world. This becomes abundantly clear as we move through examples; the chapters on birds' senses of taste, touch and smell are particularly full of "we thought this, then we thought this, and then someone did this and now we're starting to realize this..." All of this is, of course, as applicable to any other field of scientific study as it is to ornithology.

Even just applicable to ornithology, though, it's a wake-up call. I don't know how long I've been perpetuating the myth that birds, outside of a few exceptions, can't smell. Apparently this is quite far from the truth, at least for significant numbers of species. Birkhead even discusses the fact that some sea birds, like albatrosses and petrels, probably use a sort of "scent landscape" to help them find their prey -- meaning that those birds, at least, have a far better sense of smell than humans. Ravens and vultures have no problem finding fresh carcasses -- and knowing when they are past their delectable prime. Most birds likely have at least some rudimentary sense of smell, or are able to smell an extremely selective set of things. I can take some comfort in the fact that there are textbooks and field guides still published with the "birds can't smell" fallacy in them, but really. It's been known since the 1960s that birds can smell things. So there's a lesson in how long a particular piece of incorrect trivia can hang around.

Quite apart from carefully popping myths, Birkhead loves the history of ornithology. This is clearly a passion. He's written an entire book on the subject, The Wisdom of Birds, which I'll be on the lookout for. He knows an incredible amount about the historical research and attitudes, regularly bringing ornithologists from the 1800s or earlier into the discussion. Some of them are well-known -- Darwin, Audubon -- while others are more obscure but important. I was particularly taken with the story of Betsy Bang, the medical illustrator in the 1950s who started to really feel that we had the whole smell thing wrong, based on the drawings she was doing to accompany her husbands' scientific papers.

Anyway. I could keep going. The book isn't entirely perfect; though interesting, I felt that the final chapter, the one on bird emotions (if they have them; like Birkhead, I am inclined to think they do in some form or another) to be relatively weaker than the others largely due to less research and therefore less for Birkhead to discuss. While I understand the reason for the order of the chapters, it doesn't end the book well. The postscript goes some way to addressing that, because it's quite strong, but it's not long enough to satisfy. But really, other than that small nitpick, I loved this book. I'll be watching for other Birkhead books, and I'll be buying this one for my collection. I'm rather hoping he does a second edition in ten years, so we can find out what else we've been wrong -- or right -- about in the upcoming decade.

I'll leave you with a bit about guillemots, which I've always liked, but which may now be some of my favourite birds thanks to Birkhead (a hide, for those not versed in British birding terms, is also known as a blind):

While conducting my PhD on guillemots on Skomer Island I constructed hides at various colonies to be able to watch their behaviour at close range. One of my favourite hides was on the north side of the island where, after an uncomfortable hands and knees crawl, I could sit within a few metres of a group of guillemots. There were about twenty pairs breeding on this particular cliff edge, some of them facing out to sea as they incubated their single egg... On one occasion a guillemot that was incubating suddenly stood up and started to give the greeting call -- even though its partner was absent. I was puzzled by this behaviour, which seemed to be occurring completely out of context. I looked out to sea and visible, as little more than a dark blob, was a guillemot flying towards the colony. As I watched, the bird on the cliff continued to call and then, to my utter amazement, with a whirr of stalling wings, the incoming bird alighted beside it. The two birds proceeded to greet each other with evident enthusiasm. I could hardly believe that the incubating bird had apparently seen -- and recognised -- its partner several hundred metres away out at sea.

Birds? Amazing.

The Island of the Colorblind by Oliver Sacks

The Island of the Colorblind
by Oliver Sacks
Alfred A Knopf, 1997
298 pages

There is something about the way that Oliver Sacks writes that I find both enchanting and vaguely uncomfortable. His narrative is always intensely personal in a way that can be delightful -- accessible, charming, and incredibly smart -- but also slightly uncomfortable, because, as he admits himself, he can be querulous and anxiety-prone, and the reader can't help but pick up on that sometimes. His writing reveals a rather intimate portrait. It's not annoying, but it's the sort of thing that we're conditioned to politely look away from, I think? But Sacks always lays it all out there on the line, without drawing undue attention to his neuroses. I suspect, being a neurologist, he's more aware than most of his own tendencies.

Island of the Colorblind is a travel journal, more like Oaxaca Journal than The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, which is rather the opposite of what I was expecting. Unlike Oaxaca Journal, though, the purpose of Sacks' travel in this case was based in his job as a neurologist. It's split into two parts, the first being a chronicle of his journey to the titular island, a tiny atoll called Pingelap, and the second being a chronicle of his unrelated journey to Guam. The thread holding the two together is very thin indeed, but could be identified as his interest in islands and the biological consequences of isolation. In both cases, he made his journey to investigate a neurological phenomenon present in abnormally high numbers on their respective islands: on Pingelap, achromatopia, a complete colourblindness; on Guam, lytico-bodig, a serious and extremely complicated neurodegenerative disease showing remarkable likenesses to his post-encephalitic patients back in New York. However, don't let the fact that he's there as a neurologist fool you; Oliver Sacks is in love with plants, so we get plenty of information and exposure to the botanical life on the islands as well. Overall, it's a fascinating melding of neuroscience, botany, history, and culture that makes for really interesting reading.

Interesting, but not always comfortable. The first chapter, "Island Hopping," sounds like it might be a relatively pleasant way to start the book, but it was easily the most depressing chapter. It's not Sacks' fault, as he's working with the material he's given: specifically, a rather arduous airplane journey through the Marshall Islands before they get to Pingelap, in the Carolines. These were inhabited at one point, many of them, pre-American nuclear testing. Some of the experiences Sacks has on his way to tiny Pingelap are harrowing (from a damaged plane to an enforced landing on a brutally military island) and the brief notes he makes about some of the islands are extremely unsettling. Throughout the book there are often small hints of bleakness; discussing the diet of the islanders and its reliance on Spam, melancholy notes about environmental degradation, comments on the historical treatment of the island cultures by various colonial powers.

And when I say notes, I also mean endnotes; some of the bleakest stuff has been relegated to the [wonderfully eclectic and comprehensive] endnotes. I usually prefer footnotes, but some of these are so long as to be completely unmanageable. I tended to read the full chapter, then read the notes for the chapter second; they were almost a full chapter in themselves. None of them are, by definition, integral to the narrative or the understanding of the book, but they make the reading a richer experience.

Interesting to think that this was published nearly twenty years ago now, with the trips themselves being earlier; many of the people Sacks met are likely dead or retired, and many of the environments he saw are likely changed beyond recognition; one wonders, for example, if Pingelap can survive a sea-level rise? A sobering thought amongst several sobering thoughts brought to light by this book.

Sacks is especially good when he gets talking about his passions. The entire last chapter of the book, "Rota," is basically about cycads. Along with ferns, these are a particular passion and fascination of Sacks', and in this chapter he is both whimsical and whip-smart, so incredibly learned that he talks well above this reader's head, but I didn't mind. His enthusiasm carried me along. He takes much knowledge on the reader's part for granted, without making one feel stupid if one didn't follow exactly what he was talking about. In fact, it got this reader more excited about looking things up than frustrated with my lack of knowledge. I'm more excited than ever, too, about reading Darwin, which I have been meaning to do for ages. Leading a reader to want to learn more, in a passionate and immediate way, is a special gift that some nonfiction writers have, and some don't. Sacks has it in spades.

Not just for the topics, either, but also for words themselves. Sacks has a remarkable vocabulary and he's not afraid to use it. My favourite word from the book, favourite enough that it has entered my functional vocabulary, is "horripilation" -- synonymous with, but so much more delicious and specific than, goose bumps, and obscure enough that I haven't found a spellchecker familiar with it yet.

"At one point," he added, "people wondered if the lytico might be caused by some similar kind of fish poisoning -- but we've never found any evidence of this."

Thinking of the delectable sushi I had looked forward to all day, I was conscious of a horripilation rippling up my spine. "I'll have chicken teriyaki, maybe an avocado roll -- no fish today," I said.

It is interesting to me that overall the sections on botany and culture made far more of an impression on me than the neuroscience parts of the book did. I think the second part, set on Guam, is a stronger piece overall than the first, set on Pingelap; the first seemed a bit more rambling and less focused, and also one gets the faint impression that Sacks, while he enjoyed himself, wasn't quite as engaged. On Guam, however, he unfolds the mystery of lytico-bodig disease for the reader with careful precision, making connections and sharing his admiration for his host. And the final chapter, as mentioned above, deals with lytico-bodig not at all, but with cycads, which Sacks clearly loves and thinks are utterly worthy of everyone's attention, interest, and respect.

I don't think this is the best Sacks I've ever read, but it was thoroughly enjoyable, and I'm very glad I read it. Chewy without being intimidating, and very very readable, as Sacks always is. Recommended for popular science junkies, people with an interest in islands, armchair travelers, and anyone who is open to learning something new.

Lakeland by Allan Casey

Lakeland
by Allan Casey
Greystone Books, 2009
352 pages

If it is a wizard you seek, find one who has seen enough for his hair to go grey.

I placed the e-copy of this on hold quite a while ago in the hopes of reading it at some point. It's the One Book One Community book for my region this year, and I'd been thinking of reading it anyway after hearing Allan Casey interviewed. It's kind of a brave choice for OBOC, though it's not out of line from some of their earlier choices (ie. The 100-Mile Diet). To get a whole community to read a non-fiction book isn't easy, but this is an excellent choice. Perhaps I'm only saying that because it's right up my regular reading alley anyway, though.

Casey has structured this book as a sort of travelogue; he undertook to visit important Canadian lakes (excluding the Canadian lakes we always think of, that is, Erie, Ontario, Huron and Superior, which aren't exclusively Canadian anyway) and write one chapter per lake. He looks at the environmental context and also the cultural importance of the lakes, in some cases their economics, in others their biology, and often both. Each chapter introduces us to at least one person with life-long ties to the lake in question, and sometimes to others with more fleeting ties.

It's not always a comfortable or comforting book to read, in that Casey is a clear-eyed and practical recorder of events, people, places, and problems. He's not unrealistically optimistic. He's also not gloomy, either, which can be the other (and more common) problem with books of this sort. This book is also not a call-to-action, which are the sorts of environmental reads I hate most, because they tend to get me all fired up and then, almost immediately, I feel desperate and guilty, impotent and ashamed. Lakeland more of a call to awareness, and a very effective one at that. What this means is that I often think about the book, and the lakes, and our relationship to them, in ways that I haven't done before, without becoming mired in that perennial environmental problem of apathy born of a feeling of hopelessness.

I can only speak for myself, but the kinds of problems Casey identifies suggest that the fact that I am not the only Canadian out there to take our lakes for granted. It's a problem of abundance. We have so many, we are so used to them. They are a part of our psyche, our cultural unconscious. So we don't recognize how incredibly lucky we are to have them. I can't imagine living in a country without easy easy access to lakes. This week I'm spending by one of the Muskoka lakes (I am one of the fortunate to have access to these from the comfort of a building without a million dollars burning a hole in my bank account) and I read this book sitting on the shore of Georgian Bay, which is my lake, the lake that I judge all other lakes by. 

I think Lakeland is saved from becoming too gloomy or strident by Casey's excellent writing skills, and his excellent sense of proportion. The book is not unrelentingly about the problems. It's often funny, often beautiful, and his turn of phrase is almost poetic at points. His love for the country he calls Lakeland is transparently visible, his desire to bring all of us along with him is infectious. He looks at the problems and then finds the good, the little toeholds where things might take off for the better. It's a friendly book, and much of what he writes is familiar to a long-time lake-lover like myself.

I think this is one of those books that every Canadian should read -- new Canadians, to orient them to a vital part of the psychology of their new home, and Canadians from families that have been here for generations, to remind us of just how lucky we are to have our lakes. It's a worthwhile read for others, too; I'd wager a guess that not a few Americans understand how wonderful a Canadian lake is, or have a special American lake of their own. As a primer for anyone interested in Canada or travelling to visit us, one could do far worse. It's a uniquely Canadian book, but I think its appeal is wider.

Longtime readers know I don't normally highlight causes here, but the Canadian government has decided we don't need to bother with lake research in this country any more, which is completely baffling. They are shutting down the world-renowned Experimental Lakes Area to "save money" (it will cost several billion dollars to shut them down properly) and we will lose a vital part of our scientific, and dare I say, cultural heritage. Be aware.

Proust and the Squid by Maryanne Wolf

Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain
by Maryanne Wolf
Harper Perennial, 2007
306 pages

How miraculous it is that the brain can go beyond itself, enlarging both its functions and our intellectual capacities in the process.

I confess: I am intellectually lazy. I like things easy-to-understand, gentle on my mind. A little, tiny bit of work is fun, but generally I want spoon-feeding. I don't say this as a mark of pride, and I know I have a tendency to laugh it off -- "oh, it's just one of those things about me, you know? I'm lazy." But frankly, it's something, when I do stare it in the face, that I regret -- not a source of embarrassment, but a source of wistfulness. One of the reasons I think this blog is good for me is because it forces me to think sometimes. And when I do think deeply, I enjoy it. Thinking deeply, critically, analytically about things is what I miss so much about being in school. The wider world does not call on me to think the way school does; it doesn't (necessarily) prevent it, but it rarely encourages incisive thinking from me. So one has rather fallen out of practice.

As with this book. Reading the first section was a combination of small problems for me: I am out of practice with reading more challenging things, and I think that perhaps the first section of Proust and the Squid is a bit drier than some of the rest of the book. It's hard to say exactly how much of each was a problem, but I had to work hard to read the first bit, and to understand it. I am fairly sure that I didn't understand pieces of it, and will likely go back and try again.

Do not take this as a criticism of the book. This is an excellent book. It's challenging not just in its subject, but also to its reader. It does not force the reader to become a deep thinker, but it invites it. The second section is a fascinating dissection of the individual process of learning to read, one that I think I will find quite handy in my work, and the third section is a comparison of the unusual differences between a "regular" reading brain and the brain of dyslexics, as well as some more recent research and a little bit of speculation (Wolf is eminently qualified to speculate) on what exactly dyslexia is. Hint: we don't quite know, but we do know that it's not exactly the same in every individual. Also, we know it definitively exists, and there is evidence directly in the structure of the brain, despite the fact that some people will insist on telling you it's one of those things that the medical/educational establishment has made up.

Another thing I enjoyed about this book is how playful Wolf can be. Her section headings in Chapter 5 amused me, and often referred back to things that I'd read in earlier chapters or sections. She picks very apt quotes and even recites, in its entirety, a rather amusing poem on the quirks of English language spellings. While I did find the first section -- with its discussion of the history of writing, reading, and the neurological changes that happened to allow the above innovations, somewhat tedious -- dry, and I think in many cases simply beyond me, there were parts of it that were extremely interesting. With more practice, I might be able to understand more of it. Moving into the second section, in which Wolf discusses the development of the reading brain in individual children, felt like a relief and one wonders if it was a bit of a relief to Wolf as well.

She uses examples exceedingly well to illustrate her points, which otherwise might be challenging to grasp; one of my favourites is from page 123:

Vocabulary contributes to the ease and speed of decoding. Here's an experiment to illustrate the same principle for adults. Try to read the following terms aloud: "periventricular nodular heterotopia"; "pedagogy"; "fiduciary"; "micron spectroscopy." How fast you read each of these words depends not only on your "decoding" ability but also on your background knowledge.

What a simple, yet effective way to demonstrate the point she is trying to make to adults, who have (as we are reading this book) long since learned to read and read well, and forgotten the challenges we might have had as beginning readers.

This blog entry is going to be rather long, so in case you want the short version and not the version in which I attempt to enshrine in memory particular aspects or facts: this book is about how reading, and in particular about how the changes reading has made in the human brain, have allowed us to become what we are today. It is about how the biological processes in the reading brain have allowed the intellectual leaps we were able to make as individuals and as a species. Wolf is curious, engaging, and in awe of the incredible plasticity and adaptability of the human brain, and she is in love with writing and reading. This makes for a fascinating, involved, and ultimately inspiring read, and I'd recommend this book to anyone with an interest in neuroscience, literacy, how reading develops in children, and how reading has come about and changed our societies. Work your way through the dry parts because the payoff is absolutely there.

***

One of the things that strikes me about this book is how both ambivalent and curious Wolf seems to be about the changes that are happening in the way we receive information, and particularly in the way the brain works as we navigate an increasingly visual medium, the internet, to glean information. One can hear her concern clearly, that we are losing integral neural connections in the brain, losing the ability to think deeply and engage with written material, as we become more accustomed to instant information and a visually-based digital world. It turns out I am not the only intellectually lazy person out there. As humans, we tend to like shortcuts in which we are fed the analysis, rather than come up with it on our own. This is not necessarily good for our brains.

But one can also hear her curiosity about what comes next; she compares those of us who are alarmed by these changes to Socrates and his vehement distrust of the written word and the Greek alphabet. Clearly, despite Socrates' concerns, writing has been a good thing. We have the luxury of centuries to know this. But Wolf cautions that we shouldn't dismiss Socrates' concerns, either -- his alarm was valid. We lost something in the transition from an oral culture to a written culture, just as we gained something else. The reader gets the feeling that Wolf sees us losing something as we move from written culture to visual culture, but that she also sees the possibility of gain. What that gain is we have yet to figure out, but Wolf wants to know what it is.

Another interesting moment: Wolf is redefining the meaning of "fluency." It does not necessarily mean speed, exactly, so much as it means reading fast enough to provide the reader with time to think about, internalize, and examine what one is reading. Page 131:

Fluency does not ensure better comprehension; rather, fluency gives enough extra time to the executive system [of the brain] to direct attention where it is most needed -- to infer, to understand, to predict, or sometimes to repair discordant understanding and to interpret meaning afresh.

It appears, for example, that I may have to revise my vehement disagreement with the phrase "this book changed my life." Previously, I have been of the opinion that books don't change lives, that people change their own lives perhaps in response to a book. But Wolf makes a reasonable argument that reading (a book or otherwise) actually does cause measurable, physical changes in the brain -- which then, necessarily, does change one's life even if in minute ways we don't fully recognize day to day.

This book will have practical implications for the work I do with the very young at the library, and has re-fired my interest in pre-literacy, early literacy, and literacy in general. I am extremely glad I have read it, and will certainly be reading it again at some point in the future. I ordered my own copy so I can make margin notes and highlight things. Because I am going to try to think a little more deeply about it the second time through.

A Blessing of Toads by Sharon Lovejoy

I've been wanting to read and review this book since Nan posted about it months ago. I won it in her generous giveaway but it seemed to arrive at a particularly low point in my non-fic reading abilities, and I didn't want to ruin the book by reading it in the wrong mood.

I'm so glad I waited. This is a lovely book, and while it was a good book to read all at once, I think it would also be a good candidate for picking up and reading a little bit at a time. A Blessing of Toads is a collection of Sharon Lovejoy's articles from Country Living Gardener magazine, little bite-sized pieces (none longer than five pages) all smushed together into one book. To be honest, I've never read Country Living Gardener and I've never read anything by Lovejoy, so I wasn't sure what to expect. Whatever my expectations were, they were surpassed.

I learned a lot. I've been in outdoor education for the past eight years, and I grew up in a very nature-conscious family. I've been surrounded by naturalists my entire life, and so Lovejoy didn't have to convince me of the wonders of having nature in the garden -- to me, that's the point. But I learned a lot from her about nature, and also about things I could be doing to attract further critters to the backyard. Even more, she reminded me (I knew, but sometimes it's hard to remember) to just take the time to watch. I know there are amazing things happening in my garden every day, I just need to look for them. So I was envious of her stories -- of her family of crows, of her garter snake, of her phoebe nest -- but I realize I am just starting. I've got a long way to go, and I've also got some time to catch up.

Lovejoy also has the perfect gardening philosophy for me:

I like this laissez-faire gardening attitude. Newman's words of wisdom coupled with Julian Donahue's comment, "A lazy gardener is one of the best friends of wildlife," leads me to believe that I may have found my gardening niche.

She calls hornworms unicornworms. I'm going to start using this, and maybe I won't be so squicked out by them (because I can handle almost anything, but a hornworm is a big, twitchy, squishy thing with a horn, people -- a unicornworm is the trusty steed of the tomato flower sprite, and noble, not terrifying). She also coins the title term, "a blessing of toads" to replace the term "a knot of toads" for a group of the trusty little amphibians. I like the way she thinks.

A few of the other things I learned:

• syrphid flies (flowerflies) have voraceous larvae called "aphid tigers" that will eat a plant clean of aphids and other garden pests
• Nashville warblers can eat three tent caterpillars a minute -- now, not saying they do that every minute of every day, but that warbler is really moving

I also liked:

"Crepuscular" is a great word that rolls around in my mouth like a handful of jawbreakers.

She's humble, enthusiastic, and energetic -- her personality bubbles through the pages, sometimes factual, sometimes whimsical, always informative. I am giving this book to my co-worker Joanne to read, because I know she'll love it.

Thanks again, Nan. We have some of Lovejoy's other work at the library and I'll be checking it out. I love finding a new garden writer who both inspires and relaxes me.

Island of the Blessed by Harry Thurston

I feel like I should be doing something really exciting here, to mark the end of my engrossed reading of Island of the Blessed. Fireworks. Trumpets. Something.

However, what I will do instead is try to keep this review to something short and sweet.

First, and most important: for all of my griping about the length, this book is worth it. I have learned so much since I started reading, and the whole thing is fascinating. Every chapter, every page, every paragraph, is worth reading and absorbing and digesting. There is absolutely no doubt that this book is large because the Dakhleh Oasis Project (DOP) is a huge undertaking, and Thurston has obviously taken great pains to do both the DOP and the oasis itself justice. As someone who hadn't even heard of the Dakhleh Oasis prior to picking up the book, I think he's succeeded; perhaps someone who has been there might feel differently, but I think he's managed to capture the essence of the prehistory, history, culture, and environment of this remarkable place. He's also telling the incredible stories of the archaeologists who are part of the DOP, and, on top of the place and the people, he's saying something about archaeology itself, and about human nature.

This is only the second book by Thurston that I have read. The first was the autobiographical natural history book A Place Between the Tides. Island of the Blessed is very, very different but equally good. In this book, Thurston remains largely in the background, surfacing occasionally to go on a walk with one of the DOP's scientists to a particular place of interest. His own opinions and commentary are largely confined to the Introduction and the Epilogue, and this has the effect of letting the Oasis and the archaeology tell the story. It works incredibly well. This book is masterfully written and incredibly accessible, as well as being completely absorbing. Even when I was anxious to start reading the next book (or books, as the case may be) I was far too interested in Island of the Blessed to put it down.

Thurston's skill with language is so deft that, without the reader noticing, he's describing the archaeologists and their environs in such a way that they are vivid and real people and places. One of my small gripes is that I want to see more pictures -- I want to see what a town in the Oasis looks like, I want to see what a wadi looks like, I want to see what the buried city of Kellis looks like -- but really, I don't need those photographs. I have a clear picture in my head. I can hear the different scientists' voices as they speak, and see them as they work on their various projects, because Thurston makes them all come alive. He makes me believe, as the DOP believes, that the great expanse of the Western Desert was once a vast savannah habitat, complete with waterholes, giraffes, and hippos. He explains, in language anyone can understand, how changes in climate and glaciation eventually led to desert conditions -- and what that meant for both the wild animals and the nascent human civilizations that lived there.

The book takes us from prehistory to current conditions in the Dakhleh Oasis. One of the things that Thurston wants us to understand is how unique this project is: it is one of the very few long-term archaeological studies that looks not just at human activities, but also environmental conditions that surrounded those human activities, in an effort to understand how each has affected the other. He spends more time on the periods where there is more evidence to talk about -- certain times in prehistory, the Roman civilizations -- but he doesn't leave anything out. He celebrates the important discoveries made by the DOP, and talks about the future of the project; and at the end, inevitably because of the nature of the DOP and the author, Thurston talks a little bit about the future of life at the Oasis. The prognosis is somewhat depressing, as expected -- the current water supply, fossil water buried in the bedrock and stored there since prehistoric times, is likely to last fifty years or less if current practices continue. And if the water runs out, life will cease to be possible in the "Everlasting Oasis." And Thurston doesn't say much, but an intelligent reader in a society where water isn't a limiting factor will suddenly understand how it's possible that wars really will be fought over water supply.

In the interests of actually posting this tonight, and thus completing my self-mandated one review a week, I'm going to leave it at that. I recommend this book to anyone interested in Egypt, for sure, but also anyone interested in archaeology, science, political issues of water use, desert cultures, the beginnings of human civilization, palaeontology; also anyone who wants an introduction to any of those things. I came into this book without really any knowledge at all in any of the areas Thurston was writing about, and I had no trouble following except that I do wish someone had provided some sort of visual timeline so I could get a sense of the length of time we're talking about, and what cultures overlapped whom and when. Thurston is thorough enough that I could write one out myself, but I'm lazy and it wasn't that important to my enjoyment or understanding.

A Place Between the Tides by Harry Thurston

I first read this book a couple years ago now. It was another one of those somewhat serendipitous Christmas finds; I saw it at the local bookstore and I decided my grandmother would like it. She loved it, and leant it back to me. I devoured it, despite starting a new job and all of the stress and craziness that accompanies that. We had great conversations about this book, Grandma and I.

I bought my own copy recently, wanting to recapture the same awe and warmth I had felt for Thurston and his salt marsh. It didn't work entirely, but it worked enough that it remains one of my favourite books about nature. I love Nova Scotia and I intend to visit there again soon, but last time I read this I was feeling particularly rootless and dissatisfied with Ontario; this book made me desperately long to pick up and move East. It still did a little bit, but I didn't have that desperate longing that followed me into my dreams the last time I read it. That's not the book's fault, that's just me being in a different place.

Part of this book's charm for me, I am realizing, is the format. I really like the [seemingly] straightforward chronological setup in a nonfiction book. It's an easy way to set up a narrative even where there might otherwise not be one. It worked for me in An Ecology of Enchantment and it works for me here.

A Place Between the Tides is contains years of observation all packed into one "year"; that is, each chapter contains years' worth of observations taken in that month as opposed to a face-value day-by-day chronology. This can be a little jarring. For example, when we first meet the foxes the main vixen is Black Socks; but other chapters discuss White Face, Black Socks' mother, and the fluid continuity of the narrative is marred. At other times it works really well. Because let's face it -- a year's worth of observations on a salt marsh might be interesting, but there may be only three or four really tale-worthy events in any given year.

Not that Thurston tells us only of the big things -- the beaching of a minke whale, or the first glimpses of a litter of foxes, or the hurricanes or the peregrine falcon. He spends a gratifying amount of time on the little things, too, the "ordinary" ecology of a salt marsh, talking about the marsh grasses or the processes that bring nutrients into the marsh or carry them out again. Because of my own personal inclinations, I think he's at his best when offering cool tidbits of information about the marsh or its inhabitants, as here when describing the physical adaptations of the northern gannet to spectacular aerial dives into the ocean:

It has no nostrils, and its upper and lower bill fit tightly together to prevent ingestion of water on hitting the waves. Most important, it has a system of air-cells between the skin of its neck and shoulders and the muscles beneath. Upon diving the gannet inflates these cells to cushion its body and head from the tremendous force of impact.

That kind of stuff fascinates me, and it clearly fascinates and delights Thurston too. Bits like this are woven throughout the entire book, intertwined with poetic descriptions so vivid that I am sure I can see every blade of Spartina sp. grass, every cloud, every minnow. Anyone who has ever encountered a spring evening frog chorus or a June bug will recognize this:

This is the night music of spring, and an anthem to evolution. We listen a long while, until the night chill descends. As we make our way back to the house, June bugs splutter out of the grass, crashing blindly into the clapboard.

There were a few things I noticed more this time around that did have an impact on my enthusiasm for the book. Occasionally the poetic is a little overdone and it slides from vivid and refreshing to excessively wordy and a little purple. What's worse, to my mind, is Thurston's habit of falling into the same trap that many naturalists and environmentalists do. I know why he does it, and I do it myself although I am very deliberately trying to stop. Take this passage:

Because I do not have the ear of an expert birder, I must see the birds to know which ones have survived the contemporary threats of pesticides and deforestation and the age-old perils of migration to return to the north woods. (Warbler populations have declined by as much as 20 percent in recent decades.) For the most part, it is the male birds that sing, feathered Carusos belting out their love songs to attract a mate.

Way to ambush me there, Mr. Thurston. It's a little like watching a Sir David Attenborough nature documentary (you know, "Look at these cute, helpless little baby animals, whose parents work tremendously hard to care for them, and are the pinnacle of evolution to fit this niche... ... EATEN!")

I know why it's done. People need to be aware of human impact, aware of the challenges, and aware of frankly terrifyingly precipitous declines in biodiversity. (Wait, did I just do it there?) But as I grow older and hopefully wiser, I have to wonder, what do we naturalists accomplish by doom and gloom? Wouldn't we be better to use our opportunities, such as this wonderful book, to open others' eyes and show them how remarkable all of nature is? I think the doom leads to disillusionment and helplessness, when it doesn't piss people off; none of these feelings are conducive to creating motivation or passion.

That said, I don't think Thurston ever chastises. He keeps it to facts. Some of the facts are sad. Many of them are not. I don't think the occasional doom and gloom seemed as prominent last time I read it, and I wonder if I'm perhaps a little oversensitive to it now.

Overall, this is a wonderful book about the rhythms of nature, about history and homecomings, about a very special place, and about one man's deep and abiding love for the world around him. Despite the occasional shortcomings, I highly recommend it for nonfiction and science junkies like myself, or people interested in reading about interesting places and the creatures (human and not) who inhabit them. I have Thurston's book Island of the Blessed, about an Egyptian oasis, tucked in the queue.

The Science of Sherlock Holmes by E. J. Wagner

Partly work-related and partly for fun, I'm on a bit of a mystery kick. We're watching Series Two of the British murder-and-gardening-in-one show, Rosemary and Thyme, and I'd finished Maisie Dobbs, and so I picked up The Science of Sherlock Holmes to give me a bit of nonfiction. I am a big Holmes fan, although not crazy (as sometimes happens with Holmes fans). I thoroughly enjoy Laurie R. King's Mary Russell, too, in spite of myself. And I've always found forensics fascinating.

This is a very quick, very easy read. Wagner goes about things in an organized fashion, looking at one or two aspects of forensics (trace evidence, autopsy, ballistics, etc.) per chapter, and taking us through the history of forensics as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would have known it. We meet some of the grandfathers of forensics (legal medicine, or medical jurisprudence, as it was called) and are taken, sometimes at length, through real-life cases where forensic science was first applied and making a difference. Sprinkled liberally throughout are quotes from various Holmes stories that highlight how important science is to criminal investigation. It's not so scientific that only experts could understand it; I think anyone with an interest in science, medicine, crime or Sherlock Holmes would be able to understand the vast bulk of this book.

The references to things Sherlockian are very endearing, although occasionally quotes or stories are reused in multiple chapters which makes me wonder why -- there are lots of stories to choose from. My favourite short, "Silver Blaze," gets a mention a couple of times, which pleased me to no end. Occasionally a point would be a little belaboured, as in how sloppy investigators can be when investigating crimes, or how bad science can lead to terrible judicial mistakes.

I was growing a bit weary of the last chapter, in which Wagner talks about bad science and how "expert" testimony can be disastrous (another favourite point) but then I recalled the massive amounts of damage so-called pathologist Dr. Charles Smith managed to do with bad science and expert testimony here in Canada. His expert testimony imprisoned multiple innocent people for the murders (which have since turned out to be, in some cases, accidental deaths) of children, destroying lives. And the judicial system let him get away with it; this is another point that Wagner makes, although that one only in passing. So maybe it's a point that needs to be made more than once.

It is a little chilling how easily people will believe in the infallibility of science. Science itself is great -- but sometimes the people who practice it are not. Sometimes they make genuine mistakes. Sometimes they are lazy. Sometimes they don't have all the information and spring to conclusions. Sometimes they are deliberately dishonest. Sometimes they're just misguided. To be honest, before I read this book, I still believed that hair and nails grow after death -- a myth, apparently, disproved quite a long time ago. Now, it's not my business to know that sort of thing, but I suspect that if someone had asked me whether or not it was true I might have said yes, thus perpetuating myth when science has proved otherwise.

When more is at stake than some kid going home and saying "guess what I learned today!", as is the case in a criminal investigation and court case, it is so important to get it right. These are people's lives here. Wagner mentions several cases where the wrong people are convicted -- or when the right people are not convicted, and end up taking more lives before they're finally caught. All based on science, or lack thereof.

At any rate, it's a fascinating read, and I recommend it as an introduction to the history of forensic science for the casual reader. This book just really scrapes the surface, but serves as an excellent, interesting, engaging, and fun entry.

Oaxaca Journal by Oliver Sacks

Before we went to Cuba, I had been intending to read Oliver Sacks' Oaxaca Journal. I had it sitting on my desk for an unreasonably long amount of time. I brought it with me with the vague idea that I might read it, and it turned out to be an excellent choice. It's not very long and it is, like anything I have ever read by Sacks, a very engaging read. The man is brilliant at both observation and at making his observations accessible to the masses in writing.

On the third page, this stuck out for me, as I was enjoying the rarefied atmosphere of an all-inclusive, five-star resort:

How crucial it is to see other cultures, to see how special, how local they are, how un-universal one's own is.

We stayed at a resort, but the last time I was in Cuba I didn't. And this time we did get out to see a [surprisingly] large portion of the countryside for a day. I always have this uncomfortable feeling about traveling as a tourist anywhere. Especially Cuba, because I frankly adore the ideal of the place (there is food, shelter, education and medical care for every single Cuban, and what a necessary thing) but I also recognize that there are significant major problems with the way the system actually works. I dislike what the American government has done to Cuba, but I'm not sure that as a Canadian tourist I'm all that much better, coming to gawk at the wonderful old buildings and romanticize Castro's Revolution. I don't know how to feel about a place where everyone has the basics for a good life but they don't have the freedom to travel the way I do, or read the way I do, or express their own views the way I do. I don't know the answers, and it does trouble me. Especially because I do love Cuba so much, and the time I spent there this time didn't lessen that (I have an acute case of wanting to be in Cuba all the time now). It adds tension to what would otherwise be a really lovely, relaxing vacation. But I'm glad I have that tension.

All of that said, Cuban culture is completely, completely different from Canadian culture and there's a lot to be said for it, and how is it my place to condemn a way of life that I have very limited understanding of? And that is what the quote above reminded me to be aware of, that obnoxious colonial tendency to try to evaluate and "fix" cultures that are different from our own.

Mexico has different problems, the main being the massive amounts of poverty and governmental corruption. Sacks doesn't dwell on this but he does give it a mention. And it's nice to see the same sort of ambiguity I have about traveling to places as a relatively wealthy tourist, just expressed from a different angle and much more eloquently than I could. It was somewhat comforting to read, not because it resolved any of my thoughts but because it did clarify them somewhat, and made me relax a little knowing that I'm not alone.

All right, that's probably enough angst. On to the book itself:

The things Sacks has to say about Oaxaca are fascinating, and now I would very much like to go to that area myself (tourist-guilt aside). We get glimpses of his travel companions, and the novelty of traveling with a group of naturalists. Make no mistake -- it's a novelty. I really enjoy it, myself. There is something great about being able to shout excitement about a bird to a bus full of people and have them scramble all over eachother to get to the windows to see for themselves. In any other case, your fellow passengers would stare at their books or their shoes in embarrassment for you and hope for your sake that you keep quiet next time. But Sacks captures the thrilled naturalist-tourists quite well.

The journal is, as I suppose I should have expected, even more personal than his memoir. There were points where I was occasionally even a little uncomfortable with how personal it was, because I don't like to pry into other living people's thoughts (despite what some of my readers might think). It's not that he says anything specifically -- it's just that put all together, and probably because I have also recently read Uncle Tungsten, one gets a much fuller picture of Sacks than I was expecting, and sometimes it make me wonder if he realized quite how much of himself he was exposing.

Overall, a highly recommended book, for anyone at all because it's so quick and easy to read. But especially for anyone who is traveling to Mexico or Latin America, or anyone interested in ferns, nature or culture. I'm curious now to see about some of the others in the National Geographic's literary writers on travel series, of which Oaxaca Journal is part.

Uncle Tungsten by Oliver Sacks

In some ways I don't feel fit to review this book. I could never do it justice, which I suppose says something in itself. It is enormous, in some ways as large as the entire history of chemistry itself. It is also a portrait of one man's very difficult, lonely, eccentric and also wonderful childhood, and in places is almost frighteningly intimate. It's a bit of a paradox, because in some ways it seems so huge, and in others it seems so inadequately small, and the reader gradually becomes aware of just what could have been written, and how large that is. I think that's a fitting feeling for a memoir to have.

It's not that the book aspires to be grand, or that it is pretentious in any way. It's tremendously humble. It's also somewhat painfully incomplete without its Afterword, and I think the Acknowledgements finish the book better than the last chapter did. The "ending" is as abrupt as a surprise brick wall.

Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood is a thick, chewy book that despite its thickness and its chewiness is an infinitely easy read. The writing is eminently accessible. It offers only glimpses into what must have been a truly remarkable family, and reads like a tribute to many of the Sacks and the Landaus as much as a memoir. The book itself is somewhat fragmentary, sewn together with a long and meandering thread of the history of chemistry and sometimes, but mostly not, seems like more of a history of chemistry itself than an autobiographical piece by a neurologist. But it was a history of chemistry that was accessible enough that I began to remember how fascinating I used to find chemistry myself, before school killed it for me. It makes me sad that the home chemistry lab is basically a relic of the past. I think it's probably wrong that I secretly think the kid who recently blew off his fingers trying to make a rocket in his garage is awesome. Most parents wouldn't let their kids anywhere near anything that might possibly be a little bit dangerous -- Sacks, on the other hand, had uranium compounds in his lab as a boy of twelve.

There are parts of this book that are heartbreaking. Sacks touches on -- though never dwells on -- the abuse he suffered at a residential school during WWII, and the abuse and bullying that apparently literally drove his older brother mad. Though understated, the reader gets the deep sense of how dreadfully lonely Sacks must have been at points in his childhood, battered by circumstances beyond his control. But for Sacks, as a boy, there were also supportive, caring, highly intelligent adults and siblings. And there was chemistry. There was the history of chemistry and the giants of discovery (an entire chapter is devoted to Humphrey Davy, for example, who I had only vaguely heard of before), and there are also the actual elements and experiments and apparatuses themselves, each described in enthusiastic, awe-filled detail. The book reads like a love letter to chemistry.

The fact that I did enjoy it as much as I did is a testament to Oliver Sacks as a talented and very human writer. I haven't decided which of Oaxaca Journals, The Island of the Colorblind, An Anthropologist on Mars, or Musicophilia I should read next. Or any of his others. Probably the first I get my hands on.