The Story of Earth: The First 4.5 Billion Years, From Stardust to Living Planet, by Robert M. Hazen

Robert M. Hazen’s exciting explanations of how the Earth and its geologic and biologic systems formed and changed had my head spinning with growing knowledge and dawning comprehension. About five billion years ago—several billion years after the Big Bang, which Hazen explains well enough for me to finally grasp, somewhat—an event such as a shock wave from an exploding star caused a cloud of gas and dust to collapse into a star system, our Solar System. “Like a twirling ice-skater, the big cloud rotated faster and faster as gravity pulled its wispy arms to the center. As it collapsed and spun faster, the cloud became denser and flattened into a disk with a growing central bulge—the nascent Sun.” Scientists can’t say for sure how the planets formed, but because all the planets more or less rotate in the same direction and are more or less on the same plane, Hazen explains, most scientists speculate that the planets formed from the same rotating gas and dust as the Sun, and were not objects hurtling through space captured by the Sun’s gravitational pull, as was once thought.

The Earth has gone through many drastic changes since forming. The names of the chapters in The Story of Earth illustrate this: Black Earth: The First Basalt Crust; Blue Earth, The Formation of the Oceans; Gray Earth: The First Granite Crust; Living Earth: The Origins of Life; Red Earth: Photosynthesis and the Great Oxidation Event; The “Boring” Billion: The Mineral Revolution (Surprise: these billion years were anything but boring!); White Earth: The Snowball-Hothouse Cycle; Green Earth: The Rise of the Terrestrial Biosphere. I’ve never really imagined our planet as anything other than a grey ball of rock slowly turning blue and green as life began. This book shows how that view is far from accurate.

The Moon, too, has changed over the billions of years. Did you know that it is moving away from the Earth by about 3.82 centimeters per year? Scientists know this because Apollo astronauts left mirrors on the surface of the moon in the 1960s and 70s, and scientists measure the distance very accurately by bouncing laser beams off them. If the moon is moving away from the earth at that rate, can you imagine how close the moon was to the earth 4.5 billion years ago? It would have looked gigantic. The surface of the Moon was quite different back then, too. According to Hazen, “The early Moon was a violent body of intense volcanism, quite unlike the static silvery-gray object we see now. Its surface would have appeared black, with glowing red magma-filled cracks and volcanic basins easily visible from Earth.” Hazen explains the current theory of how the Moon was formed by what he calls “The Big Thwack,” or the giant impact theory.

4.5 billion years is an unfathomably long time. In 283 pages, Hazen is able to clarify to someone like me, who never took many science classes, the current theories of how Earth and the Moon formed, how life began, how mineralogical forces influence life and how life in turn influences mineralogy, and many other fascinating phenomena. One of the more interesting sections was of the Great Oxidation Event, something I had heard about but had never understood. He writes about how he and his colleagues figured out that many of the minerals we see today—turquoise, azurite, malachite, and thousands of others—could never have occurred without the Great Oxidation Event, and thus how such minerals would never be found on a non-living astronomical body like the Moon or Mars.

If you have an interest in this planet on which we’re living, and you want to know more about how it got here, how it has changed throughout the estimated 4.5 billion years since it formed, and where it may be going, read this book. It’s fascinating.

Check the WRL catalog for The Story of Earth

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Penguins of the World, by Wayne Lynch

There is no denying it, penguins are cute! They are also intriguing animals. Despite not being able to fly, “the penguin seems to have a greater range of ways to move than any other bird. [They] paddle, porpoise and flipper through the water, rocket and surf to reach the shore, then waddle, run hop leap and toboggan over the land” (p 26).

The author, Wayne Lynch, is a Medical Doctor turned science writer and nature photographer. He describes himself as a “penguin addict” and his passion for his subject shows in this fascinating book.

Penguins of the World is detailed and scientific enough for an ornithologist reader, but is is also written in a conversational and engaging style about a fascinating, but little understood animal which everyone recognizes but few of us know many facts about.

For example, did you know that there are only seventeen species of penguin? This figure may change because some scientists think there are a few more species and some a few less because some lump several species together as one and some split one species into several. Also only seven of the seventeen species ever go near the Antarctic. They range from the Galapagos Islands, right on the equator, to deep inside the Antarctic Circle and are adapted to the greatest climate range of any group of birds.

The book is arranged in informative chapters, some with odd titles like “Sex and the Single Penguin.” They cover everything you might need to know about the biology and lifestyles of penguins. It is filled throughout with stunning photographs by the author, and you can be entertained and learn a lot without reading a word.

Penguins of the World is a great choice for bird lovers who want to find out more about this unusual bird. I also recommend it for people who love great nature writing.  And of course if you cried during March of the Penguins, this book is a must read to fill in the details about the majestic Emperor Penguins and all of their relatives.

Check the WRL catalog for Penguins of the World.

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Miracle Planet

I imagined it differently. I pictured a warm shallow pool under a friendly blue sky, overseen by a kindly shining sun and gently stirred by a breeze. And in the pool, my far distant slime-mold ancestors were busily evolving into my grandfather. Miracle Planet shows a past that is far more savage and chaotic than my imaginings.

Miracle Planet is a five-part documentary made by a joint Canadian and Japanese team. The first two parts, “The Violent Past” and “Snowball Earth” assert that in the far distant past the entire earth was frozen solid two miles deep all the way to the equator, probably twice. The friendly blue sky that I imagined was, at some points, actually red from the high concentration of methane and then dark from debris from massive volcanic eruptions. And a meteor hit the earth millions of years before the well-known one causing the dinosaur extinction and made the planet so hot that the rocks boiled and melted miles deep. The documentary explains the timing of these events, which were millions of years apart, but I find geologic time hard to keep track of, since the time spans are so unimaginably huge.

But the most amazing part of the documentary (and perhaps the most amazing thing ever) is that life persisted! Scientists used to think that the freezing and boiling catastrophes sterilized the earth and destroyed all life on earth. Then they thought life evolved again.  But now they think that bacteria could have survived, because they know bacteria survive miles deep in diamond mines in South Africa.

I learned many other things such as the greatest volcanic eruption ever in the history of the earth occurred in what is now Siberia and made ninety-five percent of the existing species extinct. Also that dinosaurs were very bird-like, in that they were better at oxygen exchange than the early mammals because they had air sacs. The series moves up in time to early humans.

I came across this series when I created a display on “The End of the World” and it will fascinate buffs of apocalyptic scenarios. Even if I can accept my personal mortality (and less readily the mortality of my loved ones), the extinction of our species is still horrible to contemplate, let alone the extinction of all life on earth.

Miracle Planet has wonderful images and graphics and I also recommend it for those interested in science. The library owns a lot of great science documentaries and I love them because, at their best, they bring an immediacy to a subject that a book can lack, because sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words.

Check the WRL catalog for Miracle Planet.

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Hallucinations, by Oliver Sacks

A new Oliver Sacks book is always an anticipated event, as the library’s hold list for this book shows.  His blend of scientific accuracy, accessible writing style, and  empathy for his subject shine through.  It also means that his 12 books are still in print even though the first one, Awakenings, was published almost 40 years ago.  Williamsburg Regional Library owns Awakenings and seven of his other books and they are still flying regularly off the library shelves.  My colleague, Barry, wrote about Musicophilia in 2009, but I think a new Oliver Sacks book is worthy of another post.

I often check out other books that purport to be about the workings of the brain, because I am fascinated by the idea that the squishy stuff in my head is doing things I’m not planning even though I feel like I am making decisions.  Sadly, I often don’t finish them because they read like the author is using neurology to push a point of view or they are so dry it sends me to sleep.  Each of us is using our brain to read  this, but what is actually happening in that ten pound lump on top of our shoulders?

Hallucinations aren’t a subject I had considered much before, but it seems that the blotches of deep color I see sometimes as I fall asleep are officially hallucinations.  I would have thought real hallucinations would be more exciting!

Hallucinations is a challenging book – not because it’s difficult to read – it’s definitely not (some medical vocabulary is clearly explained by Oliver Sacks). Rather, it is challenging because it stands assumptions on their heads.  People who hear voices are crazy, right?  This is assumed in popular culture, for instance in Harry Potter when Ron and Hermione tell Harry that hearing voices is not a good sign even for a wizard.  But in real life “most people who hear voices are not schizophrenic” and auditory hallucinations are far commoner than I thought.

Like all Oliver Sacks’ books this one is filled with little known facts such as every culture has “found and sought hallucinogenic drugs and used them, first and foremost  for sacramental purposes” and also filled with startling information like people usually find Charles Bonnet syndrome hallucinations “unthreatening” and sometimes enjoy and look forward to them.

This is science writing at its best as it is readable, but still scholarly. The book includes an index and long bibliography.  It has extensive footnotes, which are interesting, but sometimes I found them distracting as they took up almost half the page.  Oliver Sacks’ books are as fascinating as the best novel when, for a short while, the reader can live someone else’s life.  The reader can feel Sacks’ profound understanding of the humanity of each of his patients, however odd their conditions make them appear.

If you are an Oliver Sacks fan, then rush out to get this book (Williamsburg Regional Library users can use the link below to place a hold on it).  If you are new to Oliver Sacks, but like memoirs, or you like science writing or health writing,  try it and you may get hooked.  If you or a family member has been troubled by hallucinations Oliver Sacks in his warm, inclusive way, may make you feel less alone.

Check the WRL catalog for Hallucinations

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Rabid: a Cultural History of the World’s Most Diabolical Virus, by Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy

Did you know that rabies still kills 55,000 people worldwide every year?  And that there are plausible connections between rabies and the myths of werewolves, vampires, and zombies?

Everyone has heard of this disease.  And many of us take our dogs and cats regularly to the vet for their rabies shots.  Why do we bother?  Why are we so scared of rabies?

It could be the 100% fatality rate.

It could be that rabies is one of the few diseases that travels through the body through the nervous system, rather than the blood stream.

Rabies is a singularly frightening disease and Rabid: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Diabolical Virus is a great way to learn about it its effects on human history.

Bill Wasik is a journalist who wrote the book with his veterinary wife, Monica Murphy.  The book goes over the basics of the disease, but as its subtitle,  A Cultural History suggests, it goes into depth about what rabies means to people throughout history.  The disease has been known since ancient times and ancient writers like Pliny the Elder described it with some accuracy, although their cures usually weren’t much help.

One reason that rabies is so horrifying is that it attacks the brain and changes a person’s personality in a way that a disease like pneumonia doesn’t.  A person with rabies is often affected psychologically,  including symptoms like paranoia and hallucinations.  Victims frequently become terrified of water, even though they want to drink, so rabies is known as hydrophobia.  Bill Wasik suggests (as others have done) that these changes are what led to myths of vampires and zombies as they are creatures that are human, but not human at the same time.

The book reveals many quirky facts about rabies.  For example, because the rabies virus travels slowly along the nervous system, once a person is  bitten by a rabid animal, the onset of symptoms depends on how far way the bite site is from their brain.  Therefore a person bitten on the face will get sick more quickly than someone bitten on the foot.

Although still a horrifying incurable disease, rabies does provide some hope in medical science.  The rabies virus is unusual in that it can get past the blood brain barrier, which usually prevents viruses and bacteria, but also medicines, from getting from our blood into our brains. This means that theoretically a modified version of the rabies virus could be used to get medicine into the brain.

Rabid: a Cultural History of the World’s Most Diabolical Virus is  a fascinating, but sobering book.  It is not a medical text, but it is an excellent choice for people who enjoy medical and epidemiological history like The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson or Plague: A Very Short Introduction by Paul Slack.  I also recommend it for people who like science writing, or those who are fascinated with zombies and vampires and other creatures who are frighteninglyaltered humans.
Check the WRL catalog for Rabid: a Cultural History of the World’s Most Diabolical Virus

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Nature Wars, by Jim Sterba

“How human encroachment hurts wildlife has been… common knowledge for decades. This knowledge isn’t wrong but it is only half the story.”  page 269

My first view of my new North American home was as my plane descended to land in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada.  I was struck by the verdant summer landscape – from above it looked like a forest – which was odd, because it was then a city of 750,000 people.  After reading Nature Wars by Jim Sterba I am not surprised by my puzzled reaction, because as he says, “Three out of four residents [in the Northeast of the United States] live in or near land under enough trees to be called forestland if they weren’t there.” page 52

How can this be true? Haven’t we and our ancestors been busily and irreversibly destroying nature for hundreds, if not thousands of years?  Jim Sterba argues that we have certainly changed nature, but not in the ways many of us assume. He reports that a huge regenerated forest stretches from Norfolk, Virginia to Maine, and most of the book is about this area.  Modern people like trees, and we like to live among them, so as our houses sprawl further apart in suburbs and exurbs we plant trees in the gaps.

The deforestation of the Northeast was at its peak in the late 1890s.  It has taken 100 years for the forest to grow back.  We’ve been able to let it grow back because we don’t have our ancestors’ desperate need to use trees for fuel and building materials, and also because we don’t need to farm marginal East Coast land because so much of our food comes from the hugely productive Midwest.

Significantly, with the regenerating forest comes resurgent populations of some of the forest animals.  Jim Sterba devotes chapters to the burgeoning populations of beavers, deer, Canada geese, wild turkeys, black bears, and feral cats.  All of these, except feral cats, live naturally in this area. Their populations dropped after Europeans came to North America,  but they are doing very well under the way modern people manage the landscape.  So well, in fact that Jim Sterba notes that some estimates put the population of white tailed deer at the highest it has ever been.

It seems strange that there could be so many large wild animals living among so many people, but I thought of the deer I regularly see and also thought of the deer-car collision I saw in the highway lane next to me.  As the wild animal populations have grown and the human population has grown, conflicts are inevitable, accounting for the word War in the title.

When there is a direct conflict of one individual’s or species’ needs over another’s, then inevitably someone doesn’t get their needs met.  In the events described in Nature Wars it is not so clear whose needs should come first, and people can vehemently, sometimes violently, disagree.  Is it more important for deer to be able to run free or people to be able to successfully grow gardens?  This problem has even been addressed in our library collection:  Fifty Beautiful Deer-Resistant Plants: The Prettiest Annuals, Perennials, Bulbs, and Shrubs That Deer Don’t Eat, by Ruth Rogers Clausen. Or what about when the conflict is between two animal species?  Do humans intervene to save the song birds at the expense of the feral cats or let things fall out as they will?  For those who say that we should just leave nature alone, Jim Sterba argues Americans “are actively managing the nature around them in ways they barely recognize or think about – with their gardens, lawns, landscapes, mulch bins, garbage cans, bird feeders, pets, cars, and species partisanship, to name a few examples.” page 293.  We must accept that we are stewards and caretakers of the land and the animals whether we particularly want to be or not.

In my native New Zealand the isolated islands have a very delicate and unique ecosystem.  Introduced cats and dogs wreck havoc on the native birds, so feral cats are generally, and not too controversially,  killed in native forests.  Jim Sterba points out that in America feral cats have partisans who sometimes resort to death threats of those they feel threaten the cats.  The partisans for and against the  ”Trap, Neuter, Release” program for feral cats are so strident, that the American Veterinary Medical Association refuses to support it or say they don’t support it.

I found this book enlightening and kept saying to myself  “Really? That can’t be true!” but Jim Sterba talked to and quotes dozens of working scientists, park rangers, and other experts, and he documents it his research in the extensive notes.  Nature Wars will certainly interest people who read nature books, and those who like to garden, bird watch, feed stray cats, drive along deer-free highways or use goose poop-free parks, to name a few.  It also provides a unique perspective on the social history of the settlement of the United States.  And most importantly it opens up conversations on very contentious issues that aren’t going away.

Check the WRL catalog for Nature Wars

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Plague: A Very Short Introduction, by Paul Slack

” There was plague somewhere in Europe almost every year between 1348 and 1680″ page 34

“Most poignant of all are the expressions of the pain and loss created by one of plague’s cruelest features: the heavy mortality it inflicted on single families and households, as relatives and servants died one after the other” page 66

The library owns over sixty volumes in an interesting series that are literally easy to miss, because they are slim books less than seven inches tall, with covers I can only describe as boring.  They are Very Short Introductions published by Oxford University Press.
Our titles range from Agnosticism: A Very Short Introduction, by Robin Le Poidevin to World Music: A Very Short Introduction by Philip V. Bohlman, stopping on their polymath way to visit The U.S. Supreme Court: A Very Short Introduction by Linda Greenhouse and Plague: A Very Short Introduction by Paul Slack.

The topics are all serious, including subjects that many people would like to get to know better, but don’t have the time to study in depth.  These little volumes are just the place to start if you don’t want commit to a lengthy book.  Despite their small size every Very Short Introduction includes references, further reading and an index.  They are written by learned people who do a good job of making their subjects accessible without dumbing them down.

Plague: A Very Short Introduction is about the Bubonic Plague, the disease caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, but the book covers other plagues with uncertain causes that were recorded right back to Biblical times and beyond.  Author Paul Slack points out that virulent epidemic diseases can have similar effects in human lives, no matter what their causes or when they occur. One effect can be a loss of population and seemingly empty cities ” ‘Grass grew in the streets,’ says Paul the Deacon in Rome about a plague in 680, and Samuel Pepys about London a thousand years later in the plague of 1665.”

Plague: A Very Short Introduction covers the biology of the disease but it is mainly about its history and social effects.  It is often argued that the decline in population from the Black Death in Europe in the 1300s caused the end of Serfdom, a system that tied Serfs to their Lords and the Lord’s land.  Other people think that it also led to the Industrial Revolution because technology was needed to fill in for labor shortages.  Paul Slack argues that this is too simplistic a view.  The long term effects of plague depended on the situation before the disease hit.  Some places, like Sicily recovered more quickly, even though they had a higher mortality rate.  Serfdom did decline in Western Europe, but in Eastern Europe the lords were powerful enough to impose serfdom on previously free populations.

The book also uses written accounts from the time to look at the effects of the plague on individuals, even those who survived.  Despite not knowing about bacteria and viruses medieval people observed that human contact made disease spread.  They frequently instituted quarantines that kept people in as well as keeping people out, sometimes cruelly as family members or servants were thrown out of their homes at the first sign of disease.  Other people showed a better side of humanity, nursing abandoned strangers at the risk of their own lives.

Unsettlingly for the future, Paul Slack says that we don’t know the exact reasons that the plague became so devastating.  Changes in climate (possibly caused by a meteor), changes in animal populations, expanding trade routes and increasing urbanization are all possibilities.  We don’t even know why it ended:  ”The end of the first pandemic remains a puzzle, the greatest mystery in the whole history of plague.”  Maybe it hasn’t ended, Bubonic Plague still occurs naturally in the Western United States and infects up to 5000 people worldwide every year.  In terrifyingly dry language, the World Health Organization classifies plague as a “re-emerging” disease.

Plague: A Very Short Introduction is a good choice for readers of historical medical non-fiction such as The Ghost Map and I recommend the entire Very Short Introduction series  for anyone who ever needs any short introduction to a topic (and who doesn’t?).

Check the WRL catalog for Plague: A Very Short Introduction

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Moby-Duck, by Donovan Hohn

Any parent who has put an exuberant toddler in the bathtub with a single rubber duck understands the possibility of the bedlam that can ensue.  The subtitle of Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them indicates Hohn’s desire to understand the possibilities when the bathtub is transformed into the sea and the single rubber duck is transformed into a shipping container full of bath toys.  On top of that, bath time lasts the better part of two decades in this scenario.

Shipping containers lost in the ocean are far from uncommon.  The greatest contributor to what is known as the Great North Pacific Garbage Patch may very well be Nike shoes, Air Jordans prominently among them, although anything that ships is liable to land in the ocean.  The container that spawned this story was one of 12 to go overboard in a storm south of the Aleutian Islands near the International Date Line on Jan. 10, 1992.  Legend has turned all the lost bath toys into yellow rubber ducks, but the polyethylene (plastic) creatures were divided equally among yellow ducks, red beavers, blue turtles, and green frogs.  Of course, the smirking yellow duck proves to be the most intriguing for Hohn because of its status as a childhood icon thanks to Ernie of Sesame Street fame.

Moby-Duck is not the first book inspired by the incident. Eric Carle’s picture book Ten Little Rubber Ducks came out in 2005, about the time Hohn learned of the wayward bath toys.  What especially caught Hohn’s attention was the rumor that someone had found one of the toys in Maine in 2003, 11 years after the toys had splashed into the Pacific Ocean.  When Hohn embarks on his quest to determine if that could be possible, he does so with childlike curiosity and hope. What ensues is his struggle to maintain that innocent imagination when faced with realities such as a global economy, treacherous oceanic transportation, and plastic pollutants.

Questions borne of both curiosity and skepticism eventually lead Hohn to surrender his job as a teacher at a private Quaker school in Manhattan to pursue his search for answers.  In a variety of vessels including a container ship and an icebreaker, Hohn makes trips to the Aleutians, Hawaii, Hong Kong and the Guangdong Province in China, and the Arctic Circle over three years.  His chase for a yellow duck representing the comfort of youth quickly morphs into an adult romanticism of adventure.  That spirit of exploration results in Hohn taking several risks out on the high seas, all to determine the possible fate of a plastic bath toy he could buy for $1 or less.

Hohn illustrates his skill as a teacher with numerous literary references, most often to Moby-Dick, although he vacillates to his sense of childhood frivolity with frequent mentions of Carle’s Ten Little Rubber Ducks.  In addition to imparting his wisdom on literature (yes, picture books do count as literature), Hohn capably offers lessons of oceanography throughout Moby-Duck and sprinkles in history lessons of other commercial losses at sea as well as of other explorations along the waterways of his journey.

As for Hohn’s journey, the possibility that a yellow duck  — or, to be fair, a red beaver, blue turtle, or green frog — could travel from the upper Pacific to the shores of Maine remains a concern until the end of his chase in 2008.  In the end, though, the accumulation of facts and probabilities is only part of the story.  Drawing on several years’ worth of travel, intensive study, and research, Hohn shares his insights on navigating the sometimes stormy waters of the adult world yet still seizing opportunities to let youthful exuberance set sail on occasion, or at least to splash around in the tub now and again.

Check the WRL catalog for Moby-Duck

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Between the Folds (2009)

Would you believe that a handful of artistic and scientific geniuses have actually turned their backs on traditional science and math careers to spend the majority of their time folding paper in super-advanced forms of Origami?

“What are the limits, the physical limits of this artform?”

I was once fascinated by artists such as Paul Gauguin, who shed his respectable life (including his wife and children) and escaped to exotic Tahiti to paint with wild abandon. This documentary includes interviews with various scientific wizards from around the world who have abandoned their ordinary lives and even lucrative jobs to pursue their Origami passions to an extreme.

They’re using their amazing brains to meld science, math, music, and engineering with art, advancing Origami theory further than ever dreamed, beyond Origami pioneers such as the great Akira Yoshizawa (1911-2005), who is credited with moving traditional Origami into its more sculptural era using wet-folding. He also designed the step-by-step notational diagramming system so common in the instruction books used today. This made it possible for nearly anyone, even without natural artistic ability, to create beautiful and adorably cute objects out of Origami paper. Utilizing the compilation of previous knowledge, Origami scholars are using complex mathematical algorithms that elevate art to scientific awesomeness and seeking ways that Origami can significantly contribute practical solutions such as in curing diseases. When thinking of Alzheimer’s, for example, may we someday be able to unfold or refold our lost memories?

Do not watch this DVD with the expectation that you will learn how to make some cool new Origami creations. This movie will just awe you with such unbelievable designs in Origami that only its top geniuses can master. Many of their works took hours, even hundreds of hours, to design, fold, and sculpt into phenomenal art!

“Any square paper can be folded into any shape!”

Between the Folds is a visual feast, well worth your time. I was most awed by Chris Palmer’s gorgeous folded-paper interpretations of light patterns and movement inspired by the Alhambra in Granada, Spain. There are some very interesting, short interview excerpts (“outtakes”) in the special features that provide additional detail on a number of subjects briefly featured in the film. Some of the interviews allow some delightfully quirky personalities to shine and may elicit a few giggles. My teens and I were mesmerized by this video; they wanted to shuck their homework and get out the box of folding papers, but I reminded them that the geniuses in this film got their degrees first and then they advanced the art of Origami! I did concede that there were examples of students whose math and science skills improved through the use of Origami in the classroom.

Check the WRL catalog for Between the Folds.

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Grzimek’s Animal Life Encyclopedia, by Bernhard Grzimek

Grzimek’s Animal Life Encyclopedia lives up to its name. It is definitely an encyclopedia, with 17 huge volumes. I don’t necessarily want to admit to being a nerd who reads the encyclopedia for fun but this one is worth a second look, particularly for animal lovers. Our library has two sets of Grzimek’s and the set shelved at the James City County Library in Croaker Road can be checked out (and requested for library users who prefer to go to the Williamsburg branch), so I challenge anyone who is fascinated by books like Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat or anything by Jane Goodall to try Grzimek’s for the sections on animal behavior. If you love to watch Cesar Milan work his magic with dogs or are moved by Dogtown, you’ll be fascinated by the section on canids. If you’ve a passion for birdwatching, tropical fish, or you just love animals, try these great books.

Grzimek’s is a standard for both public and academic libraries and it is prominent in any standard list of essential science reference titles. The academic library where I previously worked considered them so essential for undergraduate students that we bought them both in print and online. We told biology students starting their important essays that they always needed to start their animal research with Grzimek’s.

This said, these books have a lot to offer the everyday reader. They are beautiful volumes with lots of stunning photographs, drawings of individual species, and species distribution maps (although I have to admit, they are large volumes and I didn’t have much success trying to read them in bed). The first volumes are about invertebrates, and then they go up through fish, amphibians, reptiles, and mammals. I am a sucker for cute, fluffy animals so I pulled out volume 12 about mammals. It starts with general chapters on topics like “Ice Age Giants,” “Migration,” and “Mammals and Humans,” then the accounts of individual species starts with Australian marsupials. For more obscure species, this information may be difficult to find elsewhere. For example, did you know that some species of quolls (carnivorous marsupials in Australia) always die young? They live in an extremely harsh environment and the males die soon after their first breeding season.

Grzimek’s has a lot for bird lovers, including four volumes covering birds from all around the world. I was charmed to learn the one of my favorite childhood birds, the New Zealand Tui, is described as “among the best singers in the world. The song is rich, melodious, and includes soft liquid warbling notes, bell-like calls and chimes.”

We know that our library users are intrigued by animals because circulation is constant on books by  Marc Bekoff, or any DVDs featuring marine life or dogs. So if you are one of the people moved and bewitched by animals and the natural world then these underused library books are well worth another look.

Check the WRL catalog for Grzimek’s Animal Life Encyclopedia 

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The End of Overeating, by David A. Kessler

I’m not obsessing about food.  Really.  But my reading of Sarah Wu’s book led to David Kessler’s The End of Overeating, so you could say I’m just following a chain.  But I’m not obsessed about food.  Really.  (Caveat: I compulsively overeat things like pizza and ice cream, but it doesn’t really show on me.  This is not an “I’m better than you” post, just a look at an interesting book that illuminates my own relationship with food.)

Former head of the Food and Drug Administration under the Clinton Administration, Kessler led a national drive to reduce smoking, implemented nutrition information labels on packaged food, and made it easier for experimental drugs to make their way into the marketplace.  Reading his CV (Dean of the Yale Med School, top awards from major public health institutions), you know that if anyone has credibility on the topics he addresses, it’s going to be Kessler.  And American overeating is a huge (pun not intended) topic.

We know we overeat, but we don’t know why.  We also don’t really understand why some people can overeat and not gain significant weight and others become morbidly obese with all the attendant problems.  In exploring the decisions we make about food, he conducts informal tests on his employees and observes behaviors that you can see in your own life.  Some of those tests would make him a pariah in this library, but hey, he’s the boss.  But, lest we hasten to place all the blame on evil food companies, Kessler reminds us that we do have a measure of control over our eating decisions.

Not that the food companies – from growers to retailers – don’t try to capture our taste buds by creating links between their products and our brains.  Humans crave fat, salt, and sugar; when put into a precisely designed product, balanced among those ingredients and the feel of the food in your mouth, we are almost unable to resist.  (One term that stays with me is “bolus” – the scientific name for the wad of food you get as you chew.  Kind of makes the process a little less enjoyable.)  One area I think Kessler overlooks is the relationship between processed food and the speed with which we eat.  Those chicken tenders we pick up at the drive-thru have had the muscle broken down, making it easier to chew and digest as we speed from one commitment to the next.  What do you do when that much thought is given to arranging fast, tasty product consumption?

Well, you change your routine to avoid food temptation and limit your exposure to the foods that make you overeat.  By knowing how much food it takes to make you feel full until the next scheduled mealtime, or the proper size of a snack to bridge that gap, you can scale portions back.  By knowing alternate routes home, you can avoid the temptations of all those brightly colored restaurants that line our highways.  And, in part,  knowing how food is processed before it reaches you might encourage you to take the slow food path back to a healthier relationship with your diet.  It isn’t easy, but it is worth a try.

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Feynman, by Jim Ottaviani and Leland Myrick

The late physicist and free spirit Richard Feynman has been depicted again and again in books: his own disjointed but charming memoirs collected in Classic Feynman: All the Adventures of a Curious Character; James Gleick’s fine biography Genius: the Life and Science of Richard Feynman, or the more scientifically focused Quantum Man: Richard Feynman’s Life in Science by Lawrence M. Krauss to name a few. Feynman’s quirky way of thinking, his enthusiastic cheerleading for the value of science, his gifts for explaining complicated subjects to laypeople, and his sometimes bizarre personal behavior all make him a subject for the ages.

There’s always room for one more good book about a person this complex, as writer Jim Ottaviani and artist Leland Myrick demonstrate in their new graphic biography, Feynman. It’s actually very fitting that Feynman should get the graphic treatment: one of his great achievements in science was to find new visual ways to depict equations, and he always claimed to see equations with a kind of synesthesia, visualizing them swirling around him with different parts in different colors. The artist here does this legacy fine justice, with different background colors making the book into a slowly progressing rainbow and Feynman himself drawn with wiry, jaunty, approachable grace.

Feynman fascinates. He was one of the leading scientists of the twentieth century, a man closely involved with important events like the Manhattan Project and the investigation of the first space shuttle explosion, but at the same time was famous for quixotic quests like playing instruments at Carnival in Rio, trying unsuccessfully to visit a little known region of Russia, or appearing in court to defend the topless bar where he liked to sit and think. Ottaviani does a fine job here of balancing Feynman’s scientific importance with all the qualities that made the man unusual and sometimes difficult.

Nearly a quarter of a century after his death, Feynman continues to captivate us, perhaps for the pure light of his genius, perhaps because he’s difficult to pin down, or perhaps because there’s something in his legacy to capture almost anyone’s imagination. This new book is perhaps the easiest entry point I’ve seen yet for your own pursuit of a truly curious character.

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The Elements: A Visual Exploration of Every Known Atom in the Universe, by Theodore Gray

I bought this book for my teenage son last Christmas, then found myself curled up with a cup of eggnog, regaling my family with nuggets of wisdom such as: Did you know that iodine disinfects by brute chemical attack on microbes? And that zinc slabs are attached to bridges and ships to stop them rusting? Or even that bananas are radioactive?

Much more than a book about chemistry, The Elements can only be described in hyperbolic phrases such as “a visual extravaganza.”  Each element gets a page or two of remarkable photographs on a deep black background, then a few hundred words of conversational but informative text.  The page on copper starts, “Copper is wonderful stuff.  Just wonderful,” goes on to “Copper is the only reasonably priced element that isn’t more or less gray” but also reveals that copper has “the second highest conductivity of any metal.”

The elements are photographed in their natural state (if possible) and also in the surprising everyday objects in which they occur, such as strontium in toothpaste and manganese in an antique glazed tile.

If you can’t tell helium from hydrogen and you wonder why NaCl means salt, then this book is definitely still worth browsing as it brings together subjects from history to art to biology such as when the author talks about lead piping in Rome, colorful titanium jewelry and the possible role of potassium in evolution.

If you can recite the first twenty elements of the periodic table and love all things science then this book is for you as well.  The side of each page lists an element’s atomic number, weight, density, radius, and emission spectrum, as well as its place on the periodic table and its crystal structure.

For purists, the claim that the book covers “Every Known Atom in the Universe” is, of course, out of date, since scientists have recently named two new elements but that doesn’t detract from this great book, which is a fascinating read but also sneaks in a lot of learning.

Check the WRL catalog for The Elements: A Visual Exploration of Every Known Atom in the Universe.

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We Have Met the Enemy: Self-Control in an Age of Excess, by Daniel Akst

I have to admit that I picked up We Have Met the Enemy: Self-Control in an Age of Excess because I thought it would annoy me.  I saw a bomb made out of a chocolate-coated doughnut on the cover and thought, “Another screed blaming all the world’s ills on people the author considers fat!”  I was annoyed less than I anticipated, laughed, and even learned, more than I anticipated.

Daniel Akst is a journalist whose basic premise is the question, “Why is self-control so difficult?”  He points out that some of the modern obsession with self-control is just silly.  After all, you don’t have to control yourself if there isn’t abundance.  “The problems of freedom and affluence–of managing desire in a landscape rich with temptation–are just the kind all of us should want to have.”

On the other hand, he points out that giving in to our temptations does have real and often strongly negative consequences for individuals as well as for society as a whole.  After years of education everyone knows that smoking can be destructive to an individual, but who would have guessed in 2005 that buying a large house could affect society so much?

He cites recent studies in self-control from the areas of neurology and psychology, and looks into the science of addiction and the hereditary basis for self-control.  An interesting example is the marshmallow test where small children have to choose whether to have a marshmallow now or wait until later and get a reward. It appears that self-control has a hereditary basis and also that, “Youthful self-control predicted success in later life.” This, of course, begs all sorts of questions about responsibility and whether addicts (of any sort) can really control themselves. Akst points out how these questions are central to stories as old as “Adam and Eve,” The Odyssey and Hamlet.

For those of us who are feeling a bit guilty of too many indulgences in the holiday season, keep in mind that parties, gifts, and special food are rituals that we often indulge in only once a year.  If we take into account, “how helpful ritual can be in promoting pleasure by keeping it within bounds” then one eggnog per year is not all that bad!

His writing is dense and erudite (I sometimes had to run to the dictionary) but Akst is conversational enough to be very readable.  He was sometimes very funny, as when he said, “In the early nineteenth century … Americans drank so much it’s a miracle our country’s symbol isn’t a pink elephant instead of a bald eagle.”

You don’t have to agree with everything Akst writes (and you’re certain to disagree with something) but We Have Met the Enemy is useful to everyone who has ever done anything that they knew wasn’t sensible (and who hasn’t ever eaten that last cupcake, sneaked a cigarette, bought something on their credit card just because they wanted it, put off boring paperwork or vacuuming by reading a blog?).

Check the WRL catalog for We Have Met the Enemy: Self-Control in an Age of Excess.

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The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why it Matters, by Rose George

Like many who have traveled I am intimately aware that umpteen people around the world have dirty, nasty, and awkward toilet facilities.  It is great to see the world but sometimes even better to get back to my own bathroom.  What I didn’t realize before reading The Big Necessity is that “2.6 billion people don’t have sanitation … Four in ten people have no access to any latrine, toilet, bucket, or box.”

These figures are astonishing and are what drew me to read The Big Necessity when a biology professor recommended it for Freshman Seminar classes.  Ever since reading it I have been recommending it to people, from my book club of older women to my husband as he was deploying to Afghanistan.  All of them, after giving me a strange look and being initially reluctant to tackle a book with a cover picturing a roll of toilet paper, have said that it was well worth reading.  ”Fascinating” was a word I heard a lot to describe the book and I agree–it is a surprisingly engrossing read.

Perhaps it is engrossing because this is a subject that we are even more reluctant to talk about than sex, but it is vitally important and affects us all. In ten chapters, British journalist Rose George travels from east to west as she looks at aging sewer systems in New York and luxurious robo-toilets in Japan.  The chapters on biogas and biosolids point out that the admirable goal of making use of the resources in waste has advantages and big disadvantages.  If you like to read while you eat, the chapter “Open Defecation-Free India” is the one to avoid over lunch, but even it has positive notes.

The Big Necessity isn’t a simple tirade about how people in poor countries have terrible lives while rich people have life easy–it is more than that.  It points out how we are very conservative about our toilet habits–conservative in the sense that we don’t like to change them–deep down we feel that what our mother taught us when we were toddlers is how we should conduct our business all our lives.  In many cases, whether we have a squat toilet or a seat, a private room or no doors is immaterial to health and safety but is individually very important to us.

This is an important book on an important subject that makes a great read for anyone interested in topics as diverse as international development to the psychology of our private acts.

Check the WRL catalog for The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why it Matters.

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The Zombie Autopsies, by Steven C. Schlozman, MD

Oh noes, another zombie book! Can the world sustain yet more coverage of the apocalypse brought on by the undead? Well, in this case, it not only must sustain it, but the world will be better for it. You see, we now have a clue, brought to you in this Max Brooks/George Romero-approved journal, of how the plague started and how the disease progresses. What great luck that we also now have a record of the spiritual implications of blowing their undead heads off. Whew!

On an isolated island in the Indian Ocean, a small team has been assembled for a last-ditch effort at understanding the physiology of the zombie.  Knowing that their exposure to Ataxic Neurodegenerative Satiety Deficiency Syndrome (ANSD) is certain, these brave souls intend to provide as much medical evidence as possible before they succumb to the syndrome. Or, in layman’s parlance, become ex-people. Unfortunately, it was only by accident that any record of their inconclusive discoveries made it off the island, but even those were tainted by the relative inexperience of the journal’s author, Dr. Stanley Blum.

The project is beset by difficulties, not least of which is that Dr. Blum is an administrator, not a researcher. Dr. Gutierrez, the world’s leading ANSD expert, is also rapidly progressing through the stages of ANSD, although she is able to direct the autopsies. Slowly, the project begins to reveal the medical reasons behind the familiar symptoms of ANSD– the shuffling gait, the insatiable appetite, the ability to remain active despite advanced decomposition. The most serious problem, though, is that the test zombies cannot be sedated, incapacitated, or eliminated, so the work has to be done on animated humanoids, classed as No Longer Human. And they have to be fed.

Schlozman uses an intriguing device to introduce and periodically interpret Blum’s work. The journal is accompanied by a bureaucratic memo reminding the reader that these observations provide the foundation of an upcoming meeting to create a comprehensive strategy. The memo includes a glossary, a copy of the Treaty of Atlanta (laying out the ethics of dealing with zombies), personal materials from Drs. Gutierrez and Blum, and a significant collection of emails.

Schlozman easily moves between voices, adopting the appropriate tone for each.  Blum’s handwritten journal alternates between his medical observations and a narrative of his one week in the lab. While the first are informative, the latter are both horrifying and plaintive. The bureaucrat is analytical, even detached; the Treaty of Atlanta is earnest; and those relevant emails are chilling in their specificity. There is one niggling detail at odds with Max Brooks’s description of the earliest outbreaks, but that could be put down to confusion or cover-up over the source and spread of ANSD. Regardless, this is a necessary and readable addition to the scholarly literature, and when it is declassified, should be an essential acquisition for every surviving public and academic library.

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How Bad Are Bananas?: The Carbon Footprint of Everything, by Mike Berners-Lee

In a compassionate and selfless act of environmental activism, I have decided to never handwash another dish again in my life.

Big of me, isn’t it?

Dishwashing, as Mike Berners-Lee explains, is ecologically friendly only if you use tepid water. If you’d rather not have bacteria swarming over your dishes, you’re going to have to heat the water, a process that is far more efficient in a dishwasher than in a sink.  A year of running a full dishwasher twice per week on the economy setting has roughly the same ecological impact as driving 110 miles. That’s not bad.

(If you’ve been fretting over the chemicals in your detergent, don’t. That’s nothing compared to the impact of heating the water.)

Berners-Lee, founding  director of Small World Consulting, offers a truly useful book for people who care about the planet. He considers the carbon footprint of nearly 100 products and acts, from drinking a pint of beer to having a child to waging a war. Sorted in groups from least harmful (text messages, tap water) to most harmful (erupting volcanoes, forest fires), these entries follow the format of a reference book—but it is the rare sort of reference book that you read cover-to-cover, staying up well past your bedtime to finish.

This is partly due to the humor. In discussing the carbon footprint of a cup of coffee, Berners-Lee explains that the worst pollution offenses come from any added dairy. He and his colleagues decide to forgo milk in their beverages for a week: “At best we’ll change habits of a lifetime, resulting in decades of reduced hassle, lower carbon, slight cost savings, and possibly even fractionally improved health. It has to be worth trying.”

He follows this with a footnote: “Update: We survived. It was horrible. I’m going to pick different battles.”

Berners-Lee starts with three assumptions: climate change is a big deal; it is caused by humans; and humans can do something about it. Some skeptics will not agree with those three assumptions, but they will be hard-pressed to argue with the exceedingly well-documented research and logic in the book. Berners-Lee goes into great detail to explain his analyses and conclusions, though he freely admits that the available methodologies are far from perfect; sometimes he has to rely on guesswork.

Determining the carbon footprint of an act or an object is not yet a precise science, but this book is a magnificent starting point. The precise ecological impact of each individual is subject to error and interpretation, but taken collectively, they can help readers make more informed choices as consumers.

And if you were wondering, bananas are just fine. Go enjoy one.

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How Trees Die: The Past, Present, and Future of Our Forests, by Jeff Gillman

In general, a healthy tree wants to grow taller. New growth means new leaves, and new leaves mean new sugar. But the taller a tree grows, the harder it is to transport water and nutrients from the roots all the way up to the leaves. Eventually, these two tensions can no longer be reconciled, and the tree dies of old age.

That’s what happens to the lucky ones.

When I started this book, I expected to find a lot of information about trees being harvested for lumber, or about trees dying due to climate change. Horticulturalist Jeff Gillman does touch on these topics, but the in-depth discussion focuses on other aspects of the life and death of trees, including managed deaths in fruit orchards, widespread deaths from insect plagues, and unintentional deaths from well-intentioned but deadly care.

Peppering his chapters with personal anecdotes and lots of photographs (including a photo of an Asian longhorned beetle; I do not recommend studying this one too closely), Gillman examines the life cycle of many different trees, from peach trees in Georgia (which is actually a bad climate for peach trees) to the ill-fated American elm (most elms have been killed off by a fungus that is carried by a beetle) to plants that aren’t trees at all, such as the potato, whose story illustrates the dangers of limiting the diversity in a crop’s gene pool. Gillman speaks about whole species of trees, of course, but he also focuses on a few individual specimens, guiding the reader through their unique lives from seed and growth through maturity and death.

The entire book is written in an easygoing style, with the science rendered into understandable language. I found the “Loved to Death” chapter to be particularly engaging; most of us will never have to worry about managing acid levels in an apple orchard, but many of us will find ourselves caring for a tree in our yards or at work. Gillman exposes a number 0f practices that can harm or kill a tree. Planting it deep? That can kill it. Mulching? That can kill it. Adding potting soil, pruning, topping, overwatering? It’s amazing any trees manage to survive at all.

One final tip: don’t beat your tree with a baseball bat. Though this used to be a fashionable practice, and though it’s true that excessive damage will cause a tree to send out new buds, guess what happens the following season? You’re left feeling foolish and guilty because you clubbed your tree to death with a Louisville Slugger.

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