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DEEP BLUE HOME

Name: DEEP BLUE HOME
Author: Julia Whitty
ISBN: 978-0-618-11981-3

AN INTIMATE ECOLOGY OF OUR WILD OCEAN

by Julia Whitty ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 9, 2010

A lovely, soft-spoken book about the “joy, inspiration, wonder, laughter, ideas” that come from relating to Earth’s...

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Mother Jones correspondent Whitty (The Fragile Edge: Diving and Other Adventures in the South Pacific, 2007, etc.) looks at the life of the oceans and the sea creatures she has observed over the past 30 years.

The author expresses significant concern about the fate of the many animals she has communed with, including a massive sea turtle—“straight out of prehistory…whose ancestors once shared the ocean with dinosaurs”—swimming in the Gulf of California with only a 50 percent chance of surviving in any given year because of the dangers of illegal capture, dangerous fishing gear and pollution. In the 1980s, Whitty spent two seasons on Isla Rasa, a small island off the coast of Baja California, where she assisted two scientists who were studying the behavior of falcons and the sea gulls and terns that they preyed upon. After visiting a neighboring island to observe least storm-petrels, “the smallest species among the smallest of all the seabirds,” she explains that they were probably named for Saint Peter, who, like the petrels, supposedly walked on water. In 1984, she and a partner filmed seals and small minke whales as they fished and witnessed an iceberg “slicing like a blue fluke into the air and listing in the wind before disintegrating into a debris field of slush and brash ice skidding across hundreds of yards of ocean surface.” Today, laments the author, along with the pollution of the oceans, modern fishing boats use monofilament fishing lines (with more than two billion hooks) and drift nets to catch tuna and cod, a practice that also threatens the lives of other fish, sea turtles and sea birds. In 2006, Whitty began work with a scientific crew searching for clues to the origins of life in the depths of the ocean.

A lovely, soft-spoken book about the “joy, inspiration, wonder, laughter, ideas” that come from relating to Earth’s “nonhuman world.”

Pub Date: July 9, 2010

ISBN: 978-0-618-11981-3

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2010

Categories:

NATURE | SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

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THE GREAT DIASPORAS

THE HISTORY OF HUMAN DIVERSITY

by Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza & Francesco Cavalli-Sforza ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1995

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One of the founders of population genetics describes his life's work and its scientific context in this clear and accessible book, cowritten with his son Francesco. Luigi Cavalli-Sforza (Genetics/Stanford Univ. Medical School), a true polymath, combines the insights of anthropological fieldwork, historical linguistics, and molecular biology to create a history of human evolution, both biological and cultural. Having visited African pygmies in their villages and joined them on their hunting expeditions, he can present the essence of hunter-gatherer societies in a way no theoretician can match. But his field trips also provided him with blood samples for laboratory analysis, which reveals the complex relationships of the human species over its worldwide range. After a quick lesson in the basics of inheritance and genetics, Cavalli-Sforza gives the evidence for the African origin of modern human beings (including the often misinterpreted ``African Eve'' theory) and for the spread of humankind out of our ancestral home. The author was instrumental in reversing prevailing anthropological dogma during the postWW II era; the spread of agriculture, he showed, was a mass population movement, not simply the transmission of the new technology to new users. The story told here is often complex: Several mappings of the distribution of blood types across Europe reveal different patterns of migration. (A particularly fascinating correlation between the Rh- blood type and the Basque language implies that the Basques were among the earliest settlers of Europe.) At the same time, the author points out the genetic triviality of superficial racial distinctions on which bigots and demagogues place such importance. The translation occasionally misfires in rendering scientific terms, but is generally smooth and clear. An excellent book on human origins and modern genetics, as well as an entertaining self-portrait by a leading figure in the study of both. (56 b&w illustrations)

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1995

ISBN: 0-201-40755-8

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Addison-Wesley

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1994

Categories:

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

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TIME DETECTIVES

HOW ARCHAEOLOGISTS USE TECHNOLOGY TO RECAPTURE THE PAST

by Brian Fagan ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 1995

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In a whirlwind tour of 13 archaeological sites around the world, Fagan's sleepy, fact-heavy narrative fails to present major scientific discoveries as much more than the sum of their plodding details. Fagan (Quest for the Past, 1994, etc.) has a solid grasp of the complexities and innovations of the discipline's techniques. Nevertheless, his central point, that archaeologists are now using advanced scientific technology and have transformed themselves from ``diggers to time detectives,'' should come as no surprise to anyone with even a mild interest in science. The book is compelling in those sections where Fagan details the highly specific conclusions that archaeologists draw from mundane bits of evidence (bone-fragment analysis reveals the prehistoric Anasazi of the American Southwest practiced cannibalism) and the use of high-technology instruments to explain the mysteries of ancient civilizations (the use of NASA satellites to determine how the Maya fed their large population). But Fagan undermines his stated purpose by discussing several major discoveries that were based on low-technology innovations (the flotation tank that separates out prehistoric seeds from a site on the Euphrates river) and no technology (the interpretation of Mayan glyphs by creative linguists). Nowhere does the book explain why these particular discoveries were profiled, and not all chapters include explanatory illustrations beyond a map. As such, Time Detectives is plagued by a general sense of incoherence, which is heightened by overgeneralizations, absurd arguments (the ``similarity'' between violent conflict among the pre-Columbian Chumash Indians and present-day homicide statistics), and glaringly obvious statements: ``No single genius `invented' agriculture.'' The most serious flaw is Fagan's failure to communicate the excitement of archaeological research. We are left with a detailed but superficial review of the important findings of several modern archaeologists. (8 pages b&w photos, not seen; 26 line drawings)