A big story about a small place with an ageless appreciation and discernment it would be criminal to ignore.
The rebirth of a premier nature reserve in Mozambique, recounted in a gentle storytelling style by noted Harvard entomologist Wilson (Letters to a Young Scientist, 2013, etc.).
Gorongosa National Park has only in the last two decades emerged from a hellacious civil war. Wilson provides a vest-pocket history of the conflict and pays due respect to those who were killed or devastated by the violence. However, the author was in the park on other business: to witness the slow recuperation of the parkland at the hands of the philanthropist Gregory Carr in conjunction with the people of the region. This is virgin territory for biologists—much of the park is inaccessible except by air—and Wilson’s excitement is evident on every page, most of which are peppered with spectacular photographs of fauna and flora. The author takes his time in describing inselbergs, caves, limestone ridges, deep ravines, the yellow trunks of fever trees, the parasols of palms, savannah and grassland—a wonder of habitats and an absolute treasure of biodiversity. Taking nothing for granted, Wilson walks readers through evolutionary theory—heredity divergence, mother and daughter species, speciation, adaptive radiation, and the long, strange trip of our species—and then treats them to a logbook of how fieldwork is conducted. His voice is soft, cheerful and full of confidence: If this type of reclamation work can be done in such a ravaged and remote region, think of the possibilities for turning around grotesquely polluted sites all over the world. Wilson is both a hardheaded naturalist and a dreamer: “[T]he beauty and drama and other emotions that brought me to Mozambique and this velvetberry bush were entirely in my own head.”
A big story about a small place with an ageless appreciation and discernment it would be criminal to ignore.Pub Date: April 22, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4741-5
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2014
The author of the authoritative but controversial German National Socialism and the Quest for Nuclear Power (not reviewed) here answers his critics and expands on several themes having to do with Nazism and science. The book's opening essays deal with Nazi physicist and Nobel laureate Johannes Stark, who tried to banish Einsteinian physics from Germany; with Werner Heisenberg, the brilliant young theorist who had to defend himself against Nazi charges of being a ``White Jew''; and with the Nazis' political subordination of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. In the concluding chapters, Walker analyzes the ``Farm Hall reports,'' secretly recorded and transcribed conversations among leading German scientists held captive at a British estate right after the war. The author's observations are sensitive and penetrating, and for the most part he defends himself ably against critics who have accused him of overstating the competence of nuclear physicists who did bomb-related work for Hitler and of being too forgiving of their moral failures. Walker's efforts are marred, however, by a stubborn streak: He greatly understates the gravity of the errors Heisenberg made at Farm Hall in his first critical-mass calculations, and he is much too easy on Heisenberg's friend and collaborator Carl Friedrich von WeizsÑcker, who argued that the German scientists had ``withheld'' from Hitler a bomb they could have built. The book also suffers sometimes from inexact diction, which has made Walker vulnerable to gratuitous criticism before and will continue to give rise to misunderstandings. As the author himself points out, the debates over the Nazi atomic bomb have persisted beyond all reason, considering that they came nowhere near building one. But for the true Nazi nuclear- physics junkie, this latest work will provide a high-octane fix.
Pub Date: May 30, 1995
ISBN: 0-306-44941-2
Page Count: 315
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
A whopping life of Thomas Huxley (182595), who did much to bring Victorian-era science to a lay audience. History has tended to remember Huxley as a stalking horse for Charles Darwin, a man who popularized evolutionary theory but did not himself contribute much to it. Desmond (Darwin, 1992), a biologist and historian of science, does much to correct this view- -albeit somewhat breathlessly. It is true, he writes, that Huxley, a physician born into a family of decidedly modest means, spent much of his time speaking to workingmen's associations and other working-class groups about ape ancestors and cave men; it is also true that he popularized the word ``scientist'' and coined the term ``agnostic,'' and that he wrote the first article on evolution for the Encyclopedia Britannica. Yet Huxley made several important advances in the study of the polyp- and medusa-bearing animals, the Coelenterata. Like Darwin, he saw the wonders of the natural world at first hand, having sailed as ship's doctor and scientist on a Beagle-like voyage that introduced him to odd creatures and ecological mysteries; he was thus equipped to appreciate evolutionary arguments concerning the great variability of species over time and space. Huxley was in many ways Darwin's equal, Desmond suggests, but was marshaled as a lieutenant into the cause of natural selection after abandoning his anti-utilitarian view of nature, an abandonment that made him a follower, not a leader. Desmond is too fond of overwrought prose (he describes a dissecting-room cadaver as ``a cold body and a dead brain that had once glowed with hopes and desires''), but he makes a compelling case for our viewing Huxley as a crucial figure in the 19th-century social transformation toward the modern world. This is an unfailingly interesting contribution to the history of science. (b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-201-95987-9
Page Count: 848
Publisher: Addison-Wesley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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