In this spirited and engaging book, science writer Kunzig, an editor at Discover magazine, voyages among oceanographers, alive and departed, from dockside to textbook, and reports back on our current understanding, and often dubious treatment, of the world’s oceans. Seventy percent of our world is hidden by the oceans’ surface. The often great depths precluded serious study until recently, when sonar and probes and submersibles started to take its measure. Far from the barren wastes it was thought to comprise, Kunzig makes clear, the ocean is an unfathomably rich place, even in the cold, lightless crushing deep, where the diversity of species rivals that of a tropical rainforest. Kunzig starts by bringing readers up to speed on oceanographic thinking. For instance: no, the oceans were not formed by volcanoes, but rather by a torrent of planetoids that pelted Earth and kicked up blankets of steam. He goes on to profile scientists and their seminal work, from Henry Cavendish, the egghead archetype who discovered the composition of water, to the toilers in the oceanic trenches at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. He describes the wild denizens of the deep sea (porcelain-white crabs, the utterly bizarre sea cucumber), abyssal storms, the sea floor’s endless quadrille. He delivers a Cook’s tour of seawater in global circulation, forgives the lax morals of water molecules as they change partners billions of times a second. And Kunzig strikes a number of cautionary notes. Poised as humans are to exploit the ocean to its max, it would be wise to remember our boundless ignorance as to its workings. We have nearly fished cod to extinction, a fish once so plentiful that Vikings could practically use them as cobblestones from the Faroes to Newfoundland. A nimble, thorough introduction to the ocean in all its vast, untamable, and fearsome attraction. Kunzig’s flair should stir readers’ awe and allow them to share in his protective urge.
Pub Date: March 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-393-04562-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
Delivers an avalanche of information with enough lucidity and enthusiasm to captivate not only aviation buffs, but general...
A surprisingly entertaining account of the helicopter: part history, part technical exploration, part flying lesson.
Science writer Chiles (Inviting Disaster: Lessons from the Edge of Technology, 2001) points out that rotating wings, not propellers, produced mankind’s first flying machine. The earliest, boomerangs, have turned up in ancient sites 20,000 years old. The first powered aircraft was a toy-like device whose whirling rotors raised it into the air above Paris on April 28, 1784. Despite this head start, Orville Wright made man’s first powered flight 20 years before the first helicopter wobbled unsteadily off the ground—because, Chiles explains, helicopters are much trickier than fixed-wing aircraft. Not until the 1930s did engineers realize that a simple propeller may lift a craft into the air, but it then becomes wildly unstable. A rotor must flex freely but also be damped to prevent too much flexion. To make matters more complicated, moving the helicopter through the sky safely requires subtly changing the angle of the rotor blades and the speed of the engine. The solution to these problems produced a wonderfully useful but expensive contraption. Chiles is at his best describing the persistent, often wacky efforts to persuade Americans to replace the family car with a dazzling machine whose lowest price is currently about $350,000. Aside from the wealthy, the helicopter’s cost and complexities render it unprofitable as a personal transportation vehicle. The Coast Guard, major hospitals, TV stations, police departments and other organizations with big budgets, however, make superb use of its ability to observe, hover and rescue. In the military, where money is no object, it has produced a revolution, delivering firepower from the air more accurately than a bomber and landing troops more efficiently than parachutes.
Delivers an avalanche of information with enough lucidity and enthusiasm to captivate not only aviation buffs, but general readers as well.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-553-80447-8
Page Count: 356
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
Contrary to its title, this book is not about the future of warfare, but rather the types of war the author expects the US to get involved in next. Sections of Alexander's (Lost Victories: The Military Genius of Stonewall Jackson, 1992, etc.) far-flung book deal miscellaneously with Korea, Mao's military theories, Lawrence of Arabia, the Boer War, and Vietnam. The two chapters about Vietnam vividly describe lesser-known engagements that capture, as the author sees it, much of what went wrong there. On the important question of the extent to which regular North Vietnamese troops increasingly fought a conventional war, the author argues that the main purpose of the regular units was to draw US forces into the highlands, leaving the more populated parts of the country vulnerable to the Vietcong. Alexander makes the very striking claim that the Vietcong carried the main burden of the fighting from first to last. Regrettably, when it comes to the future, Alexander falls into the age-old rut of assuming that the next major war will be essentially much like the last—that is, almost certainly ``low intensity'' conflicts rather like Vietnam—though he also allows for the possibility of a war for hegemony over Eurasia or even, it seems, a major naval war. Worse still, while one may argue about whether the disintegration of the USSR has left the US more or less secure, its seems more than a little odd to say, as Alexander does, that we face no threat from Russia—an unstable country that still has the nuclear power to obliterate us. On Yugoslavia, the most controversial military question facing the US today, the author tellingly has nothing to say. While some chapters here would make good magazine articles, as a whole the book lacks perspective, and with its silence on the human catastrophe in Bosnia, it fails the key test of relevance.
Pub Date: June 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-393-03780-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1995
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