A remarkable account of elephant communication, though difficult in spots.
Entomologist O’Connell’s memoir tracks the work that led her to uncover a previously unknown means of elephant communication.
The author and her biologist husband, Tim, arrived in Namibia’s Etosha National Park in 1992. He was to conduct an aerial census of the local elephant population, while she would focus on their behavior, working with local farmers to come up with solutions to the animals’ extensive crop-raiding. For two months each year, the couple would set aside their community-development tasks to observe the elephants. By 1992, researchers had established that elephants produced low-frequency sounds; O’Connell hoped to place these vocalizations in context and analyze their meanings. Her work soon paid off. After recording a matriarch’s panicked response to nearby lions, O’Connell designed a trip alarm that would play back the recording when the herd approached the farmers’ fields. The crop-raiding soon slowed. In the midst of her study, O’Connell noticed that the elephants appeared to be using their forefeet to sense vibrations; using her previous research on the seismic songs of the plant-hopper, a tiny Hawaiian insect, as a guide, she was able to prove that elephants pick up vibrations through their feet, vibrations that travel through toe bone, legs, shoulders and, finally, into the middle ear cavity. Using bone conduction, elephants can communicate seismically, sensing the approach of friends or foes. While O’Connell’s scientific conclusions, gathered over 14 years, make for good reading, her account of life in Namibia is distressing. Frustrating encounters with suspicious villagers gave way to meetings with cynical foreign-development workers, and the devastating AIDS epidemic overshadowed all. “God’s country is full of broken dreams!” one USAID employee aptly intoned.
A remarkable account of elephant communication, though difficult in spots.Pub Date: March 20, 2007
ISBN: 0-7432-8441-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
Jahren transcends both memoir and science writing in this literary fusion of both genres.
Award-winning scientist Jahren (Geology and Geophysics/Univ. of Hawaii) delivers a personal memoir and a paean to the natural world.
The author’s father was a physics and earth science teacher who encouraged her play in the laboratory, and her mother was a student of English literature who nurtured her love of reading. Both of these early influences engrossingly combine in this adroit story of a dedication to science. Jahren’s journey from struggling student to struggling scientist has the narrative tension of a novel and characters she imbues with real depth. The heroes in this tale are the plants that the author studies, and throughout, she employs her facility with words to engage her readers. We learn much along the way—e.g., how the willow tree clones itself, the courage of a seed’s first root, the symbiotic relationship between trees and fungi, and the airborne signals used by trees in their ongoing war against insects. Trees are of key interest to Jahren, and at times she waxes poetic: “Each beginning is the end of a waiting. We are each given exactly one chance to be. Each of us is both impossible and inevitable. Every replete tree was first a seed that waited.” The author draws many parallels between her subjects and herself. This is her story, after all, and we are engaged beyond expectation as she relates her struggle in building and running laboratory after laboratory at the universities that have employed her. Present throughout is her lab partner, a disaffected genius named Bill, whom she recruited when she was a graduate student at Berkeley and with whom she’s worked ever since. The author’s tenacity, hope, and gratitude are all evident as she and Bill chase the sweetness of discovery in the face of the harsh economic realities of the research scientist.
Jahren transcends both memoir and science writing in this literary fusion of both genres.Pub Date: April 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-87493-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Loads of good explaining, with reminders, time and again, of how much remains unknown, neatly putting the death of science...
Bryson (I'm a Stranger Here Myself, 1999, etc.), a man who knows how to track down an explanation and make it confess, asks the hard questions of science—e.g., how did things get to be the way they are?—and, when possible, provides answers.
As he once went about making English intelligible, Bryson now attempts the same with the great moments of science, both the ideas themselves and their genesis, to resounding success. Piqued by his own ignorance on these matters, he’s egged on even more so by the people who’ve figured out—or think they’ve figured out—such things as what is in the center of the Earth. So he goes exploring, in the library and in company with scientists at work today, to get a grip on a range of topics from subatomic particles to cosmology. The aim is to deliver reports on these subjects in terms anyone can understand, and for the most part, it works. The most difficult is the nonintuitive material—time as part of space, say, or proteins inventing themselves spontaneously, without direction—and the quantum leaps unusual minds have made: as J.B.S. Haldane once put it, “The universe is not only queerer than we suppose; it is queerer than we can suppose.” Mostly, though, Bryson renders clear the evolution of continental drift, atomic structure, singularity, the extinction of the dinosaur, and a mighty host of other subjects in self-contained chapters that can be taken at a bite, rather than read wholesale. He delivers the human-interest angle on the scientists, and he keeps the reader laughing and willing to forge ahead, even over their heads: the human body, for instance, harboring enough energy “to explode with the force of thirty very large hydrogen bombs, assuming you knew how to liberate it and really wished to make a point.”
Loads of good explaining, with reminders, time and again, of how much remains unknown, neatly putting the death of science into perspective.Pub Date: May 6, 2003
ISBN: 0-7679-0817-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
BOOK TO SCREEN
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