A rollicking good read for science buffs, armchair adventurers and readers curious about the natural world at its most...
Scientist Walker (An Ocean of Air: Why the Wind Blows and Other Mysteries of the Atmosphere, 2007, etc.) pens a riveting “natural history of the only continent on Earth that has virtually no human history.”
The author’s fascination with Antarctica began more than two decades ago, and it has inspired five visits. Larger than the continental United States, yet home to only 49 temporary bases, the continent is composed of two giant ice sheets. During the summer, 3,000 scientists conduct experiments, and 30,000 tourists drop in for short visits. Only 1,000 intrepid souls spend the winter on the continent. Due to an international treaty, the entire continent is dedicated to “peace and science,” and officially, the land “belongs to nobody.” Walker divides the narrative into three sections, delving into the historical and scientific sagas of the different areas of the continent. She begins with the coastal stations on the East Antarctic ice sheet, an area containing a zone so like outer space, it sports the nickname “Mars on Earth.” Walker then chronicles her journey to the interior of the continent, visiting astronomers deciphering data gathered from giant high-altitude telescopes. The author also helped scientists wrestling with the mystery of ice cores and what they can tell us about our ancient climate. In “the most conventionally beautiful place in Antarctica,” the far West, Walker chronicles the effects of contemporary and historical human activity on this strange and wonderful environment. The author adeptly clarifies the technical aspects of the science, decodes the intimate stories of reticent interviewees and weaves in the astounding and heartbreaking stories of the great explorers Amundsen, Scott and Shackleton.
A rollicking good read for science buffs, armchair adventurers and readers curious about the natural world at its most extreme.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-15-101520-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 24, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2012
Ackerman writes with a light but assured touch, her prose rich in fact but economical in delivering it. Fans of birds in all...
Science writer Ackerman (Ah-Choo!: The Uncommon Life of Your Common Cold, 2010, etc.) looks at the new science surrounding avian intelligence.
The takeaway: calling someone a birdbrain is a compliment. And in any event, as Ackerman observes early on, “intelligence is a slippery concept, even in our own species, tricky to define and tricky to measure.” Is a bird that uses a rock to break open a clamshell the mental equivalent of a tool-using primate? Perhaps that’s the wrong question, for birds are so unlike humans that “it’s difficult for us to fully appreciate their mental capabilities,” given that they’re really just small, feathered dinosaurs who inhabit a wholly different world from our once-arboreal and now terrestrial one. Crows and other corvids have gotten all the good publicity related to bird intelligence in recent years, but Ackerman, who does allow that some birds are brighter than others, points favorably to the much-despised pigeon as an animal that “can remember hundreds of different objects for long periods of time, discriminate between different painting styles, and figure out where it’s going, even when displaced from familiar territory by hundreds of miles.” Not bad for a critter best known for bespattering statues in public parks. Ackerman travels far afield to places such as Barbados and New Caledonia to study such matters as memory, communication, and decision-making, the last largely based on visual cues—though, as she notes, birds also draw ably on other senses, including smell, which in turn opens up insight onto “a weird evolutionary paradox that scientists have puzzled over for more than a decade”—a matter of the geometry of, yes, the bird brain.
Ackerman writes with a light but assured touch, her prose rich in fact but economical in delivering it. Fans of birds in all their diversity will want to read this one.Pub Date: April 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59420-521-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
In these insightfully droll essays, Gierach shows us how fishing offers plenty of time to think things over.
The latest collection of interrelated essays by the veteran fishing writer.
As in his previous books—from The View From Rat Lake through All Fishermen Are Liars—Gierach hones in on the ups and downs of fishing, and those looking for how-to tips will find plenty here on rods, flies, guides, streams, and pretty much everything else that informs the fishing life. It is the everything else that has earned Gierach the following of fellow writers and legions of readers who may not even fish but are drawn to his musings on community, culture, the natural world, and the seasons of life. In one representatively poetic passage, he writes, “it was a chilly fall afternoon with the leaves changing, the current whispering, and a pale moon in a daytime sky. The river seemed inscrutable, but alive with possibility.” Gierach writes about both patience and process, and he describes the long spells between catches as the fisherman’s equivalent of writer’s block. Even when catching fish is the point, it almost seems beside the point (anglers will understand that sentiment): At the end of one essay, he writes, “I was cold, bored, hungry, and fishless, but there was still nowhere else I’d have rather been—something anyone who fishes will understand.” Most readers will be profoundly moved by the meditation on mortality within the blandly titled “Up in Michigan,” a character study of a man dying of cancer. Though the author had known and been fishing with him for three decades, his reticence kept anyone from knowing him too well. Still, writes Gierach, “I came to think of [his] glancing pronouncements as Michigan haiku: brief, no more than obliquely revealing, and oddly beautiful.” Ultimately, the man was focused on settling accounts, getting in one last fishing trip, and then planning to “sit in the sun and think things over until it’s time for hospice.”
In these insightfully droll essays, Gierach shows us how fishing offers plenty of time to think things over.Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6858-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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