by John M. Barry ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 1997
A devastating flood is both the protagonist and the backdrop of this brilliantly narrated epic story of the misuse of engineering in thrall to politics. Over thousands of years of periodic floods, the Mississippi River deposited millions of acres of rich alluvial soil. Then, in the aftermath of the Civil War, farmers (and politicians) began demanding that the river be contained, so they could reap the soil's wealth. Former Dun's Review staffer Barry (The Ambition and the Power, 1989) describes how the supremely confident engineers of 19th-century America jumped cockily to the challenge, their attitude typified by James Buchanan Eads, who said in 1874 that he believed man was now ``capable of curbing, controlling and directing the Mississippi, according to his pleasure.'' By the 1920s engineers could brag that they had accomplished what Eads had promised. Stretches of the river were lined with massive levees 30 feet high and 188 feet wide at their base. But then, in 1927, came a flood of almost biblical proportions, and people paid for the engineers' hubris. The flood caused hundreds of deaths, hundreds of thousands of refugees, hundreds of millions in damages—and, Barry argues, the destruction of a way of life, as black sharecroppers fled north for good. Barry's narrative features outsized characters: engineers like Eads; plantation owners like LeRoy Percy, who created an almost feudal Mississippi sharecropping empire; and assorted members of New Orleans's elite, so powerful that they saved their city's bond rating by diverting the flood to their less politically connected neighbors. A fascinating, cautionary tale of humans versus nature that suffers only in its abrupt ending: Barry doesn't establish whether the flood offered more than a temporary setback to overconfident engineers and short-sighted business leaders. He barely mentions the devastating flood of 1993 or the renewed debates it engendered about controlling the Mississippi. Perhaps he's saving that story for a sequel. (photos, not seen) (Book-of-the-Month Club/History Book Club alternate selection)
Pub Date: April 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-684-81046-8
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1997
Categories: SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
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by Lulu Miller illustrated by Kate Samworth ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 14, 2020
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. 2, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | NATURE | SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
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by Hope Jahren ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 5, 2016
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. 5, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | NATURE | SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
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