BOOK REVIEW
Pandora's Baby, Bicycling Science, The Mapmaker's Wife and more . . .
David Schneider
In the late 1970s, in vitro
fertilization offered new hope to infertile couples and
revolutionized our conception of conception. Robin Marantz Henig
recreates the cultural and scientific climate of the infancy of that
technology and draws some striking parallels to current cloning
controversies in Pandora's Baby: How the First Test Tube Babies
Sparked the Reproductive Revolution (Houghton Mifflin,
$25). Doctors, lawyers, politicians and bioethicists wrangled with
the potential risks, warning of slippery slopes. But less than a
year after the birth of the world's first test-tube baby, in England
in July of 1978, the U.S. government decided to allow this
procedure. In a brisk and engaging style, Henig profiles the
desperate couples, the pioneering—and occasionally
irresponsible—doctors, and the often unscrupulous journalists
drawn to the technology. Unfortunately, she devotes too much space
to a 1973 civil lawsuit brought by a woman who considered the
contents of a test tube to be her "baby" and a reclusive
doctor who fabricated some of his results. The case, although it
fueled a media frenzy and demonstrated how quickly people would
embrace in vitro fertilization, contributed little to the history of
how science changed our notion of where babies can come from.—F.D.
The next time someone uses
that old saw "it's like riding a bicycle" to describe the
ease of accomplishing something, direct them to David Gordon
Wilson's Bicycling Science (The MIT Press, paper, $22.95).
Not that Wilson and his contributor, Jim Papadopoulos, have made
cycling more complicated than need be; rather, they have in 477
pages laid down everything the technically curious cyclist could
want to know about his or her pastime. Is it physically possible
that your buddy hit 100 kilometers per hour descending? (See
right.) Can the heat generated by rim brakes burst a tire? You
need only turn the page to find the answer.
This third edition of this bicyclist's bible is no rehash of the
previous offerings in 1974 and 1982. In his preface, Wilson notes
that Papadopoulos's expertise was particularly welcome in completely
rewriting the chapter on "Steering and Balance." Here and
in "Human Power Generation," for another example, a scan
through the references reveals how much is new: About half the
citations postdate the second edition's publication. But Bicycling
Science does much more than scientifically dissect cyclists, cycling
and bicycles. It gently dispels the mythology that so commonly
surrounds bicycle technology, while encouraging the passion riders
feel for the sport and the ingenuity and whimsy so often displayed
by cycling's innovators.—D.R.S.
In 1733, France sent a team of
scientists to colonial Peru on a momentous mission: to measure a
degree of longitude near the equator. By comparing this with a
degree measured in France, the academy could put to rest a
longstanding dispute about the shape of the Earth. Was it flattened
at the poles, as Newton argued, or elongated, as Descartes believed?
The team's adventures are recounted in Robert Whitaker's
meticulously researched The Mapmaker's Wife: A True Tale of
Love, Murder, and Survival in the Amazon (Basic Books,
$25). Whitaker captures the voracious curiosity of the expedition's
Enlightenment scientists, "set loose in a savant's
playground." Together they explore South America, catalog its
wildlife, document its culture and languages, and scale new heights
in the Andes. Voltaire called their success "a model for all
scientific expeditions to follow."
Whitaker contrasts this with the dark tale of Isabel Godin
(right), who crossed the continent to rejoin her scientist
husband in French Guiana after the expedition. Godin entered the
Amazon jungle with a party of 40 and emerged four months later,
exhausted, starving and alone. Her ordeal in the forest highlights
the real dangers of colonial exploration and points up the
achievements of what France called "the greatest expedition the
world had ever known."—G.R.
Photographer Rod Morris and
zoologist Alison Ballance treat readers to a visually rich and
wide-ranging tour in South Sea Islands: A Natural History
(Firefly Books, $35). The package is so attractive, and the
message—that isolated archipelagos show the many vagaries of
evolution—is so forcefully illustrated, that it is easy to
turn a blind eye to the occasional slipup in the text. What stickler
cares, after all, that Hawaii, one of the stops on this 13-chapter
journey from Fiji to Easter Island, is in the Northern Hemisphere?
What does it matter that mammals evolved more than 100 million years
before the authors say? And so what if the book fails to acknowledge
Wallace and credits Darwin in unsophisticated ways? It is still full
of many splendid details about the plants and animals seen on these
(largely) tropical islands, such as the spectral tarsier from
Sulawesi shown left. And having so many locales covered together
provides a wonderful sense of the rules by which nature
operates—and the exceptions to those rules.—D.A.S.
The many images collected by
M. Samimy, K. S. Breuer, L. G. Leal and P. H. Steen, editors of
A Gallery of Fluid Motion (Cambridge, $95 cloth, $35
paper), delight both the mind and the eye. These pictures, all
winners of the "photo" contest held each year by the
American Physical Society's Division of Fluid Dynamics, reveal
everything from turbulent vortices in gas flames to polygonal
umbrellas in fluid sheets (the latter is shown right). With each
picture comes the short description that accompanied the winning
entry when it was first displayed at the APS-DFD annual meeting.
Written by the original investigators, these brief summaries
authoritatively describe the physics behind these invariably
intriguing, and often beautiful, depictions of fluids in motion.—D.A.S.
Jane Hammerslough's Owl
Puke (Workman, $13.95) imparts new meaning to the phrase
"takeout food." This biology lab in a box, complete with a
foil-wrapped ball of owl vomit, a bone-sorting tray and a guidebook
detailing the birds' behavioral and culinary habits, should entice
the 8- to 12-year-old set. It offers hands-on exploration of a
modern circle of life: Owls eat their prey whole. Then, in the owl's
gizzard, the indigestible parts (fur and bones) get compressed into
"a smooth package of puke" that is regurgitated. Fungi,
beetles and moths use this matter for food and shelter. And
entrepreneurs (the guidebook informs us) sell it online for $1.65
per pretreated pellet (with a minimum 10-pellet order, please).
Fortunately, there's more to Owl Puke than a dried ball of vomit.
Fully illustrated chapters covering important owl attributes and
predator-prey relationships make the unwrapping of the pellet more
meaningful. And young readers with a pair of tweezers, a magnifying
glass and the patience to deal with small rodent bones can have a
hoot putting together a skeleton.—F.D.
There is something oddly
pleasing and intriguing about the interlocking forms that make up
the artwork of Maurits Cornelis Escher. The repeating patterns
display a range of symmetries that surprised and delighted
mathematicians and crystallographers when the artist's work became
widely known in the mid-20th century. Among these mathematicians was
Doris Schattschneider, author of M. C. Escher: Visions of
Symmetry (Abrams, $29.95), who couldn't stop wondering how the
artist was able to produce images that captured many concepts in
crystallography—some of which Escher had anticipated by 20
years! Schattschneider eventually found the answers in Escher's
unpublished notebooks of 1941–1942, which she reproduces with
translation and explanation in this revised edition of her 1990
book. This work contains more than 150 of Escher's images, many of
which have not been published elsewhere. Although Escher usually
performed his magic on flat surfaces, his talent also extended to
three dimensions in wood carvings, such as the sphere "Heaven
and Hell" (left), which he made in 1942.—M.S.
The Geese of Beaver
Bog (Ecco, $24.95) is a true story about Peep, Pop, Jane and
Harry—wild Canada geese (Branta canadensis) who've come to
nest at a beaver pond near the woodsy Vermont home of author Bernd
Heinrich. A biologist and astute observer of nature, Heinrich
learned to identify the individual geese by their faces and then
proceeded to chronicle their personal relations over several seasons
as they took mates, raised young, formed alliances and squabbled
with one another. Along the way he was witness to high drama:
rejected spouses, mate swapping, jealousy, abandoned offspring and
even what appeared to be goose depression after the surprising
murder of some innocent goslings. Although Heinrich admits that his
work with the geese is not hardcore science, there is much that
students of animal behavior will learn by reading this insightful
naturalist's thoughts on the personal lives of geese.—M.S.