THE SCIENCE CHRONICLES December 2010 BOOK ‘EM, SANTA: THE HOLIDAY BOOK REVIEW ISSUE reviews by SUSANNA DANNER BOB LALASZ CRAIG LEISHER MATT MILLER JEN MOLNAR SANJAYAN MARK TERCEK & ST. PETER KAREIVA ! a Nature Conservancy Science pub : all opinions are those of the authors and not necessarily of the Conservancy! the science CHRONICLES!!December 2010! ! Table of Contents Editor’s Note 3 Holiday Book Reviews: Fiction 4 Frazen: Freedom (reviewed by Bob Lalasz) Moying: Snow Falling in Spring (Peter Kareiva) Flaubert: Madame Bovary (translated by Lydia Davis) (Lalasz) Larsen: The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet (Sanjayan) Seuss: The Lorax (Craig Leisher) Holiday Book Reviews: Non-Fiction 10 Richards: Life (Kareiva) Goldacre: Bad Science (Jen Molnar) Dyson, ed.: The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2010 (Lalasz) Gawande: The Checklist Manifesto (Leisher) Pielke: The Climate Fix (Kareiva) Kareiva and Marvier: Conservation Science (Mark Tercek) Goodall et al.: Hope for Animals and Their World (Matt Miller) Hutto: The Light in High Places (Sanjayan) Hoving: Making the Mummies Dance (Tercek) Goldsmith: Mojo (Tercek) Vaillant: The Tiger (Susanna Danner) Vaillant: The Tiger (Sanjayan) Brand: Whole Earth Discipline (Tercek) Pink: A Whole New Mind (Kareiva) Jackson: A World on Fire (Miller) Lanier: You Are Not a Gadget (Lalasz) Holiday Book Reviews: Reading Appliances 18 Kindle 3 (Lalasz) News, Announcements and Orgspeak 19 Conservancy Publications 22 2 ! THE SCIENCE CHRONICLES December 2010 Editor’s Note !The sentence still rings in my head from grad school, 17 years ago: “There’s nothing more bourgeois than sitting down and opening up a novel,” said my colleague in class one day, sneering the sneer of the tragically postmodern. (He’s now teaching English at USC...whatever “English” has become these days in academia.) I suppose he was right on some level, when the novel was the epitome of cultural achievement. But not now. Today, culture is whatever you make it; and books (and readers) are free to be themselves, without the pressures of cultural ex- pectations or status symbolism. And with book sales in the United States no longer falling pre- cipitously (or at all), there’ll be no boo-hoo lamentations for the sad state of reading or the fu- ture of the book here — just 20 reviews of great books that you should check out during the holiday break, or consider giving as gifts. !And people do use this annual issue as a holiday buying guide. (Talk about pressure.) Thankfully, our contributors have come through: From Jen Molnar writing on bad science to Matt Miller on when science was really considered bad, from myself on the Kindle 3 to Sanjayan on a book that’s not really a book, from Sanjayan on a man-eating tiger to Sus Danner on the same tiger, from Mark Tercek on Peter Karevia to Peter Kareiva on Keith Richards...this issue of Chronicles is a literary stocking filled to bursting. (“Literary stocking”: a very mixed metaphor. “Peter Kareiva on Keith Richards”: not at all.) !I wish you a safe and restful holiday season. —Bob Lalasz [email protected] Cover photo credit: kevindooley/Flickr. Used through a Creative Commons license. To manage your subscription status: Contact [email protected] For Chronicle archives: Visit http://conserveonline.org/workspaces/science.chronicles ! a Nature Conservancy Science pub : all opinions are those of the authors and not necessarily of the Conservancy! THE SCIENCE CHRONICLES December 2010 THE HOLIDAY BOOK REVIEW ISSUE: FICTION Yes, He Made ‘Oprah’ and the Cover of TIME. You’ll Love It Anyway. Freedom: A Novel. By Jonathan Franzen. Knopf, 2010. 352 pages. You will have heard that Freedom is the novel of the decade and that Jonathan Frazen is our age’s Zola or Bellow, skewer- ing our culture like a kabob. (Also, that one of the main char- acters is a former TNC fundraiser who left in disgust). You may also have heard that the protagonists are petty and an- noying, that the plot meanders, that Franzen is getting far too much attention. It’s all true — and none of it prepares you for the astonishing experience of actually reading the book, which you will do in great gulps, amazed at how Franzen is making you breathlessly obsessed with this venal, grasping, irritating and very typical middle-class American family. It’s called empathy. Not affection, but a improb- able, creeping identification — that you, however much I dislike you, are also somehow like me, which is scary and humbling. Upon such feelings is civilization built. —Bob Lalasz The Lingering Legacy of China’s Cultural Revolution Snow Falling in Spring. By Moying Li. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008. 192 pages. ! Moying Li was born in 1954 and grew up during China’s cultural revolution. This coming-of-age memoir is categorized by its publisher under “juvenile literature.” I think not. Moying saw her teachers beaten, her father taken away and her house ransacked. Her description of the Red Guard destroying her fa- ther’s books is wrenching. Simple things like a family meal or reading a good book became clandestine pleasures that Moying had to pursue in secrecy. What Moying went through a whole Chinese generation went through — and it is that generation that leads China now, from which are drawn today’s heads of ministries and academies of science. It was only 35 years ago that the Cultural Revolution ended. And as Moying tells her story, it is clear that this dark period will always be part of her life and a foundation for her resilience and her ability to take the long view. —Peter Kareiva ! a Nature Conservancy Science pub : all opinions are those of the authors and not necessarily of the Conservancy! the science CHRONICLES!!December 2010! ! Desperate Shopaholic Housewife Goes Mad, Invents Modernity Madame Bovary. By Gustav Flaubert, translated by Lydia Davis. Viking, 2010. 384 pages. ! The best novel of 1857 might also be the best novel of 2010: It flies by in Lydia Davis’s diamond-sharp transla- tion, which is so economical it’s almost pressurized. (Davis, one of the great, unsung female fiction writers alive, sometimes writes short stories that are really short — as in, one sentence long.) But we all faked our way through this book in school — so why read it now, espe- cially if you’re a scientist? Because the cliché is also true: Emma Bovary’s deep, thrashing boredom with her time feels uncomfortably close to our own with ours, despite all our gadgets and continuous wiredness. But more to the point, because Madame Bovary is a supreme exercise in no- ticing — in being seduced by life’s details, as Charles Bovary is seduced by Emma’s shoes and silences. It is data and its interpretation, married tragically and gloriously. What else is there? !!!!!!!!!!!—Bob Lalasz And Now for Something Completely Different The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet. By Reif Larsen. Penguin, 2009. 400 pages !It’s entirely possible that author Reif Larsen is too smart for the rest of us. This book — his first — is so staggeringly different that I find it difficult to compare it with anything else. It’s like trying to compare a painting with a song: Both might move you, both might inspire and cause your imagina- tion to spiral…but which is better? ! The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet is on one level a grand travel adventure. A young boy wins a coveted prize from the Smithsonian for his cartog- raphy, and he embarks alone at dawn on a wild adventure, traversing the country from Montana to Washington, DC. What happens is both funny and poignant, but the book’s 400 or so odd pages are so much more than just a story. It’s more akin to a manual, with notes in the margins, sketches, maps, diagrams, cartoons and scien- 5 ! the science CHRONICLES!!December 2010! ! tific illustrations — you almost need an instruction guide to get through it. Stephen King said of it: “Few if any will have experienced anything like it. I am flabbergasted…” I couldn’t agree more. !In the end, I did what came naturally: read the bits that made sense to me, turned the pages when I wanted to, looked at some pages more carefully than others, and walked away entirely satisfied and mystified at the same time. If nothing else, it will make you appreciate mapmakers all the more, and it will leave you pitying the pathetic state of your own field jour- nals — yes, the ones you buy in nice leather bindings and promise at the start of every trip to be faithful to. —Sanjayan I Am the Lorax, I Speak for the Tre... The Lorax. By Dr. Seuss. Random House Books for Young Readers, 1971 (reprint). 72 pages. ! If you are only going to read one book about conservation, this is the one. Eve- rything you need to know about how not to do conservation is here. And it all rhymes. !The Once-ler built his factory in what was clearly a high conservation value forest. Bad start. Then he alienated the pow- erful local leader, the Lorax, displaced the local population, and sneered at their con- cerns. Mega bad mojo. Finally, the Once-ler relies on technology and his relatives to “big- ger” his business — the “super axe hacker which whacked off four Truffula Trees at one smacker” and nepotism 101. The result is a polluted and treeless wasteland. There’s no natural science, no social science and bad econom- ics: wrong, wrong and wrong. But like Pandora’s box, there is also a single jewel of hope: The last Truffula Tree seed is given to someone who might just replant the trees.