Most scholarly attempts at comedy, including this one, make for a painful experience, but readers who can tolerate the...
Paleontologist Martin (Environmental Sciences/Emory Univ.; Life Traces of the Georgia Coast: Revealing the Unseen Lives of Plants and Animals, 2013, etc.) has written textbooks, but this is his first work for a popular audience, and his choice to use humor as an educational tool meets with mixed results.
Everyone has seen their bones, but it turns out that dinosaurs also left behind nests, tracks, trails, burrows, tooth marks, feces, skin and intestinal contents. These have become valuable enough to produce ichnology, a subspecialty of paleontology that studies trace—i.e., not bone or teeth—fossils. A pioneer in the field, Martin delivers an expert, if overly effervescent, account of what trace fossils reveal about their environment as well as dinosaur social behavior, movement, quarrels, sex lives and care of their young. Their tracks are everywhere. Any ichnologist worth his salt can use a single footprint to identify the dinosaur, while a collection of prints reveals its height, weight, stride length, speed and perhaps tells a story. A famous site in Australia seems to show a herd of small dinosaurs fleeing a predator. Experts agree that reptiles in the Mesozoic used the same survival strategies as they do today. They built nests and laid eggs in them; dozens of both have been turning up for decades. They dug burrows whose first example was discovered only in 2007, complete with its fossilized inhabitants. An impressive amount of behavioral and dietary information is revealed in their abundant coprolites (fossilized feces), not-so-abundant stomach contents, and the rare preserved vomit and urinary deposits.
Most scholarly attempts at comedy, including this one, make for a painful experience, but readers who can tolerate the relentlessly glib, jokey prose will learn a great deal about these fascinating, long-dead creatures.Pub Date: March 12, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-60598-499-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
In three essays based on lectures, Lewis provides an engaging overview of the cultural and political clash between Christian Europe and the Islamic world from the late 15th to the early 19th centuries. Lewis (Near Eastern Studies/Princeton Univ.; Islam and the West, 1993, etc.) takes as his starting point 1492, the year not only of Columbus's discovery of the "New World" but also of Catholic Spain's victory over Islam, after four centuries of struggle, on the Iberian Peninsula. Six months later, Ferdinand and Isabella expelled Spain's Jews, with profound repercussions for all three monotheistic civilizations. Though banished from Western Europe, it wasn't until 1683 that Muslim armies, under the flag of the Ottoman Empire, were repulsed from Vienna for the last time. In briefly tracing the millennium-long clash, Lewis demonstrates how the Christian and Islamic cultures sometimes mirrored each other, noting, for example, that the Crusade resembles a jihad and that the European Renaissance was preceded about 500 years earlier by a great Muslim cultural flowering. He writes far more briefly of Judaism, but here, too, he illuminates, as in his clear discussion of the economic and political forces that drove the Ottoman Empire to welcome the Jews expelled from Spain. Lewis's multilayered analysis of why the West ultimately gained the upper hand over the Islamic world ranges broadly from the technological (the West used gunpowder, which the Muslim world largely scorned) to the linguistic (Western Europe developed written vernaculars from Latin, which accelerated receptivity to cultural change, while the Islamic world retained the beautiful, but somewhat stilted, style of classical Arabic well into the modern era). The book is marred only by a closing, overstated paean to Western civilization, in which Lewis claims that Western thinkers alone in human history have manifested intense curiosity about cultures other than their own. Still, despite its tantalizing brevity, an elegant book.
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0195102835
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Reiger, conservation editor of Field & Stream (Wanderer on My Native Shore, 1983, etc.) offers a paean to life lived close to the land. In their early 30s, Reiger and his wife, Barbara, abandoned fast-track publishing careers in New York and Washington, D.C., to settle in a quiet backwater community of coastal Virginia. This graceful memoir is largely a response to his shocked urban colleagues who asked, ``How could you do it?'' As he and his wife restore their traditional Eastern Shore farmhouse and harvest, hunt, and fish on the 67 acres of their farm, Heron Hill (which they had purchased in 1970), he feels a growing sense of connection to the land and the people who live there. He relishes a full range of country life, from salvaging serendipitous roadkill to learning the lore of his ``born here'' neighbors. This account is dense with the detail of hedgerow planting, proper nesting-box placement, the merits of mummichogs (a kind of small fish) for bait and tree swallows for mosquito control. A close observer of nature, Reiger looks also at some of the larger lessons it has taught him: Living off the land instills self-reliance, which is the only access to wisdom; traditional gender roles are rooted in the natural world; pain is proportional to one's ability to survive. His theory of conservation is equally grounded in his farm experience. Save-the- whale rallies and rainforest fund-raisers are not for him. ``Real conservation is hands on, net gain, local habitat manipulation and species management. It's not about letting nature take its course.'' Reiger is the author of 15 books and hundreds of magazine articles, but this memoir suggests that his most satisfying creative act has been the stewardship of his own land. A deeply felt, immensely satisfying memoir.
Pub Date: Nov. 22, 1994
ISBN: 1-55821-296-5
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
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