An insightful look into the unsustainability of Western waterways.
Environmental journalist Hansman paddles down the Green River considering the legacy of conflict and waste that surrounds water in the West.
The Green River marks the northerly beginning of the Colorado River, stretching down from the mountains of Wyoming into central Utah—remote country, mostly, but pocked by big farms and bigger cities, all thirsty. The author, a former raft guide who has written for Outside, Smithsonian, and other publications, takes as her larger subject a historically overallocated water supply that is quickly running out in the face of crushing demand. “At some point,” she writes, “the inflow and the amount we’re using will have to be balanced, and right now no one quite knows how that will work out.” True enough, except that it will almost certainly be worked out in a generation of lawsuits that will have to contend with, and perhaps amend, the long-standing Western water doctrine of prior appropriations, which holds that whoever gets to the water first owns it (“First in time, first in right, the saying goes”). That doctrine is of a piece with the boom-and-bust West, much of which is “a world built on future expectations” that somehow never come to pass, including the breaking of a long cycle of drought. Hansman’s journey serves as a vehicle for an issues-driven narrative so full of detail that moving across the landscape sometimes seems an afterthought: “In the morning we make eggs and bacon, dancing to avoid the mosquitoes while we finish rigging the boat," she writes near the end of the trip. At times, readers may wish that she slowed down to fully describe the scene on the ground and take a few more pages to do so. Still, she delivers a worthy updating of a core library containing such works as Marc Reisner’s Cadillac Desert and Philip Fradkin’s A River No More.
An insightful look into the unsustainability of Western waterways.Pub Date: April 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-226-43267-0
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: Jan. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
A quirky wonder of a book.
A Peabody Award–winning NPR science reporter chronicles the life of a turn-of-the-century scientist and how her quest led to significant revelations about the meaning of order, chaos, and her own existence.
Miller began doing research on David Starr Jordan (1851-1931) to understand how he had managed to carry on after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed his work. A taxonomist who is credited with discovering “a full fifth of fish known to man in his day,” Jordan had amassed an unparalleled collection of ichthyological specimens. Gathering up all the fish he could save, Jordan sewed the nameplates that had been on the destroyed jars directly onto the fish. His perseverance intrigued the author, who also discusses the struggles she underwent after her affair with a woman ended a heterosexual relationship. Born into an upstate New York farm family, Jordan attended Cornell and then became an itinerant scholar and field researcher until he landed at Indiana University, where his first ichthyological collection was destroyed by lightning. In between this catastrophe and others involving family members’ deaths, he reconstructed his collection. Later, he was appointed as the founding president of Stanford, where he evolved into a Machiavellian figure who trampled on colleagues and sang the praises of eugenics. Miller concludes that Jordan displayed the characteristics of someone who relied on “positive illusions” to rebound from disaster and that his stand on eugenics came from a belief in “a divine hierarchy from bacteria to humans that point[ed]…toward better.” Considering recent research that negates biological hierarchies, the author then suggests that Jordan’s beloved taxonomic category—fish—does not exist. Part biography, part science report, and part meditation on how the chaos that caused Miller’s existential misery could also bring self-acceptance and a loving wife, this unique book is an ingenious celebration of diversity and the mysterious order that underlies all existence.
A quirky wonder of a book.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6027-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
An intriguing meditation on the nature of the universe and our attempts to understand it that should appeal to both...
Italian theoretical physicist Rovelli (General Relativity: The Most Beautiful of Theories, 2015, etc.) shares his thoughts on the broader scientific and philosophical implications of the great revolution that has taken place over the past century.
These seven lessons, which first appeared as articles in the Sunday supplement of the Italian newspaper Sole 24 Ore, are addressed to readers with little knowledge of physics. In less than 100 pages, the author, who teaches physics in both France and the United States, cogently covers the great accomplishments of the past and the open questions still baffling physicists today. In the first lesson, he focuses on Einstein's theory of general relativity. He describes Einstein's recognition that gravity "is not diffused through space [but] is that space itself" as "a stroke of pure genius." In the second lesson, Rovelli deals with the puzzling features of quantum physics that challenge our picture of reality. In the remaining sections, the author introduces the constant fluctuations of atoms, the granular nature of space, and more. "It is hardly surprising that there are more things in heaven and earth, dear reader, than have been dreamed of in our philosophy—or in our physics,” he writes. Rovelli also discusses the issues raised in loop quantum gravity, a theory that he co-developed. These issues lead to his extraordinary claim that the passage of time is not fundamental but rather derived from the granular nature of space. The author suggests that there have been two separate pathways throughout human history: mythology and the accumulation of knowledge through observation. He believes that scientists today share the same curiosity about nature exhibited by early man.
An intriguing meditation on the nature of the universe and our attempts to understand it that should appeal to both scientists and general readers.Pub Date: March 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-399-18441-3
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
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