BOOK REVIEW
A Field Guide to Sprawl, Astonishing Animals and more
David Schneider, Roger Harris, Kate Scholberg
Field guides to plants abound,
but where can an amateur (un)naturalist find something to lead him
or her through the jungle of terms used in modern land development?
Dolores Hayden's A Field Guide to Sprawl (W. W. Norton,
$24.95) provides such a resource. This little book offers "An
Illustrated Vocabulary of Sprawl," which invokes low-level
aerial photography (by Jim Wark) to help define such cryptic terms
as LULU (locally unwanted land use), TOAD
(temporary, obsolete, abandoned or derelict) site and
duck (a building that replicates—and thus serves as
an advertisement for—the product sold within it). Readers are
also treated to examples of some more familiar language, including
interstate, strip, landfill and
gridlock (shown right). More important, Hayden's 10 pages
of introductory material, titled "Decoding Everyday American
Landscapes," gives the reader some background on the forces
that helped to shape the more or less off-putting features so
intriguingly displayed in the material that follows. Although the
book is successful in illustrating the many things we Americans have
done wrong in shaping the countryside around us, it would have been
nice to see at least a few examples of development carried out in an
environmentally and socially responsible manner. Perhaps A Field
Guide to Neo-Urbanism is yet to come.—D.A.S.
The fauna that populate
Astonishing Animals: Extraordinary Creatures and the
Fantastic Worlds They Inhabit (Atlantic Monthly Press,
$29.95) are beautiful, bizarre, marvelous and, yes, astonishing. The
book is reminiscent of a medieval bestiary illustrated with fabulous
mythical creatures. But these animals are real enough, each brought
to life through artist Peter Schouten's vivid illustrations.
Author Tim Flannery writes engagingly about the 97 unusual species
of mammals, birds, reptiles and fish depicted here. He describes
their taxonomic affiliations, geographic ranges and behavior but
does not treat these topics systematically. Rather, he highlights
the particular feature of the animal that merits its inclusion in
the book, such as the "amazing red face" (above
right) of the white uakari (Cacajao calvus calvus), a
short-tailed monkey of the Amazon rain forest of northeastern
Brazil, whose natives have nicknamed it "Englishman."
Flannery's occasionally irreverent approach sometimes leads him to
make observations that are more humorous than scientific—for
example, his remark that "surely the uakari's bald head has
more in common with a chimpanzee's buttocks than an Englishman's face?"
This book is a pure delight, a treasure for anyone with a penchant
for the weird and wonderful. It will also appeal to biology teachers
who want to inspire their charges with the extraordinary beauty and
variety of the living world, and to science illustrators, who will
appreciate Schouten's consummate artistry.—R.H.
Although the "jewels in
the crown" of U.S. high-energy physics may be Fermilab's
Tevatron and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, the Cornell
Electron Storage Ring (CESR) and its leading particle detector,
CLEO, have been a consistently bright presence. Karl Bekelman's
technical memoir, A Personal History of CESR and CLEO
(World Scientific, $52), chronicles 30 years of triumphs and
disappointments. The National Science Foundation-supported
facility's technological innovations and its contributions to
physics have earned it a firm place in history.
Beginning in the postwar years, Cornell hosted a series of shrewdly
designed synchrotrons of increasingly high beam energies. By 1980,
the CESR electron-positron collider and its associated detectors
were churning out data. For a while, CESR held colliding-beam
luminosity records; CLEO's accomplishments include the discovery of
several new mesons and quark transitions. A flood of activity in
heavy-quark and lepton physics at accelerators around the world
continues today.
Bekelman describes both the technical and the social issues that
have driven events. He tells how the courage to take risks and
commit errors led to clever, cost-saving technologies. He also
reveals that the group of CLEO physicists, the "most
democratic" of collaborations, sometimes became paralyzed in
its decision making, yet found its greatest strength in the devoted
loyalty of its younger scientists. High-energy physicists will learn
much from this fascinating narrative. (Above right, Hans Bethe and
Boyce McDaniel bicycle around Cornell's 10-GeV synchrotron ring just
after its completion in 1967.)—K.S.
In Boiling Point
(Basic Books, $22), Ross Gelbspan, the Pulitzer-prizewinning
journalist who in 1997 wrote The Heat Is On, presents an
updated offering to join the growing library of recent books aimed
at warning the public about the potentially dire effects of global
climate change. His new book bears the alarming subtitle "How
Politicians, Big Oil and Coal, Journalists, and Activists Are
Fueling the Climate Crisis—and What We Can Do to Avert
Disaster." This sort of tabloid-style self-description is bound
to lessen the appeal of Boiling Point for sober-minded
readers, no matter how concerned they might be about global warming,
but the book is certainly worth reading.
Perhaps the most interesting of Gelbspan's points concerns the role
that journalists have played in muting the message of the majority
of scientists about the massive and mostly negative effects of
global warming. Despite a wide variety of carefully documented
reports by scientific experts published both in the United States
and in international forums since the 1980s, journalists have
continued to report on global warming science using their own
version of balanced coverage—one expert "for" and
one expert "against." Gelbspan convincingly fleshes out
how notions of neutral reporting are perverted by well-meaning
journalists. In the context of global warming, dissenting scientists
are becoming harder and harder to find, but their opposing views
have frequently been treated as meriting the same weight and
authority as those of the vast majority of scientists working in the
field. The public is left in a quandary about what the evidence
actually shows. Under these circumstances, perhaps Gelbspan and his
editors believe that hyperbolic book subtitles are a necessary evil.—L.S.
Biologist James R. Spotila's
passion for his subject permeates Sea Turtles: A Complete Guide
to their Biology, Behavior, and Conservation (The Johns
Hopkins University Press, $24.95). Such enthusiasm is infectious.
Spotila, a leading sea turtle researcher, describes in some detail
the creatures' life cycles, physiology, evolutionary history and
conservation. He then devotes a chapter to each of seven species
(green turtles, hawksbills, Olive Ridleys, Kemp Ridleys,
loggerheads, flatbacks and leatherbacks), discussing distribution,
natural history and conservation status in some depth. Quirky
anecdotes lighten the prose. Tables of data are often paired with
maps to add geographical perspective. Fascinating sidebars highlight
the work of well-known sea turtle researchers and conservationists.
The accessible text is beautifully illustrated with numerous color
photographs, like the one (above right) of an
Australian flatback (Natator depressus) hatchling. Lay
readers will be captivated. The book's review of what scientists
know about these charismatic but woefully endangered creatures is
substantial enough to interest biologists and conservationists as well.—R.H.
Picture a world map and you'll
probably picture the Mercator projection, with its parallel
meridians and vast polar regions. In The World of Gerard
Mercator (Walker and Company, $26), historian Andrew Taylor
records the studious life of a Flemish cartographer who literally
reconceived the world.
Since Ptolemy's time, mapmakers have struggled to represent the
globe on a flat surface with minimum distortion. Mercator's
cylindrical projection of 1569 revolutionized geography by spacing
out the higher latitude lines. Now places could assume their proper
positions, the true shapes of the continents emerged, and a
navigator could plot an accurate course on paper. A straight line on
the map equated to a constant course at sea.
With impeccable research, Taylor shows Mercator standing on the
threshold between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, his life
shaped as much by the Inquisition and the Black Death as by Columbus
and Copernicus. The pious cartographer seemed not to realize the
value of his invention, but soon it transformed marine charts, and
400 years later it was mapping Mars. "His projection was a
triumph of modern thought in a world still concentrating on the
wisdom of ancient times," Taylor writes. "And it survived."—G.R.
Alexander Agassiz spent much
of his life quietly disagreeing with two of the world's most famous
scientists: Louis Agassiz (his father) and Charles Darwin. The elder
Agassiz gained renown for his eloquent descriptions of how nature
revealed God's workings, a position that served him well until
Darwin's theory of natural selection revolutionized the way
scientists looked at the world. The younger Agassiz agreed with the
central tenets of evolution, accepting that Darwin had the
preponderance of evidence on his side in that argument. But when it
came to coral-reef formation, he disagreed with Darwin almost as
vehemently as his father had in opposing evolutionary theory.
In Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the
Meaning of Coral (Pantheon Books, $25), David Dobbs uses
the debate over coral-reef formation to sketch the intriguing
intersection of the Agassiz family with Darwin. Darwin arrived at
his coral-reef theory before ever seeing a reef in person. Alexander
Agassiz, who believed that Darwin's theoretical ruminations were
simply shoddy science, spent the last 30 years of his life traveling
the globe to collect empirical evidence to support his own theory.
He died in 1910, but it was not until 1950 that the matter was
settled. (The photograph of Agassiz shown above right was taken in
about 1900.)
For those who already know how the reefs form, Dobbs's tale will
lack scientific suspense. However, it is still worth reading for its
account of the lives of its main characters and the ways their
careers represented the transition from the Victorian to the modern
era of science.—A.E.
How to Clone the Perfect
Blonde (Quirk, $16.95) has a catchy title that is as likely to
elicit a grimace as a grin, but it's a surprisingly successful
volume, which has fun with its tongue-in-cheek, over-the-top
premise. The book contains eight separate essays, including the one
from which the book draws its title. Authors Sue Nelson and Richard
Hollingham play to an audience of curious dreamers and
science-fiction fans with such chapters as "How to Build a
Robotic Servant" and "How to Live Forever." The
articles average about 30 pages each, and the content is fairly
substantial, especially considering the authors' efforts to make it
all witty and engaging for a broad audience. A semester's worth of
fundamental concepts are sketched out in sidebars and asides, which
open up the discussion of more recent advances in molecular biology,
genomics, consciousness, artificial intelligence, computing,
high-energy physics and cosmology. Scientists may find the shtick
irksome after a while, but a surfeit of wry jokes is a cheap price
to pay for a page-turning review of real science for the general public.—C.B.