by Richard Hamblyn ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2001
You’ll never confuse a nimbocumulus with a cumulonimbus again, once you finish this entertaining and a luminous history of...
When Luke Howard named the clouds 200 years ago, it was an exciting, popular event. Science writer Hamblyn taps into that electricity and sends it running through the pages of this exemplary, scientific-history deubt.
Others have tried to get a handle on clouds, the most ungraspable element in nature, explains Hamblyn. There were Thales of Miletus, the Taoist Ministry of Thunder, and three men whose heads were always far into the atmosphere: Democritus, Aristotle, and Lucretius. The brilliant if quixotic Robert Hooke had classified clouds in the mid-17th century (“cleer,” “checker’d,” “hairy,” “water’d,” and “lowring”), but it was Howard’s labels (“cirrus,” “stratus,” “cumulous,” and “nimbus”) that seized the popular imagination and held fast. The turn of the 19th century was a great age of science and talk, and the natural sciences were in “a search for narrative order among events. Since the sky has always been more read than measured, it has always been the province of words.” If something as restless and mutable as clouds could be captured in variations of four terms—well, that made Howard a latter-day alchemist who brought home the bacon. The author does a peerless job setting the scientific scene during the period, describing the increasingly charged atmosphere at the hall where Howard unveiled his classification, and the remarkable journey it led him on into “the nacreous realm of fame”: Goethe took his paper and made a poem out of it, while Constable consulted his work during his studies of clouds. Hamblyn is a particularly graceful writer, even when, rapt in the sound of his own voice, he finds another way to say what he said the sentence before. “Clouds themselves, by their very nature, are self-ruining and fragmentary,” he says, then quickly reminds us that “every cloud is a small catastrophe, a world of vapor that dies before our eyes.”
You’ll never confuse a nimbocumulus with a cumulonimbus again, once you finish this entertaining and a luminous history of meteorology.Pub Date: July 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-374-17715-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2001
Share your opinion of this book
by Lulu Miller illustrated by Kate Samworth ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 14, 2020
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
Share your opinion of this book
by Patrik Svensson translated by Agnes Broomé ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 5, 2020
Unsentimental nature writing that sheds as much light on humans as on eels.
An account of the mysterious life of eels that also serves as a meditation on consciousness, faith, time, light and darkness, and life and death.
In addition to an intriguing natural history, Swedish journalist Svensson includes a highly personal account of his relationship with his father. The author alternates eel-focused chapters with those about his father, a man obsessed with fishing for this elusive creature. “I can’t recall us ever talking about anything other than eels and how to best catch them, down there by the stream,” he writes. “I can’t remember us speaking at all….Because we were in…a place whose nature was best enjoyed in silence.” Throughout, Svensson, whose beat is not biology but art and culture, fills his account with people: Aristotle, who thought eels emerged live from mud, “like a slithering, enigmatic miracle”; Freud, who as a teenage biologist spent months in Trieste, Italy, peering through a microscope searching vainly for eel testes; Johannes Schmidt, who for two decades tracked thousands of eels, looking for their breeding grounds. After recounting the details of the eel life cycle, the author turns to the eel in literature—e.g., in the Bible, Rachel Carson’s Under the Sea Wind, and Günter Grass’ The Tin Drum—and history. He notes that the Puritans would likely not have survived without eels, and he explores Sweden’s “eel coast” (what it once was and how it has changed), how eel fishing became embroiled in the Northern Irish conflict, and the importance of eel fishing to the Basque separatist movement. The apparent return to life of a dead eel leads Svensson to a consideration of faith and the inherent message of miracles. He warns that if we are to save this fascinating creature from extinction, we must continue to study it. His book is a highly readable place to begin learning.
Unsentimental nature writing that sheds as much light on humans as on eels.Pub Date: May 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-296881-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 29, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
Share your opinion of this book
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Hey there, book lover.
We’re glad you found a book that interests you!
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Don’t fret. We’ll find you.