Lucent, lyrical prose evokes Macfarlane’s aesthetic, ethical, and powerfully tactile response to nature’s enchantments.
A prizewinning naturalist explores the connection between what we say and how we see.
“A basic literacy of landscape is falling away,” writes Macfarlane (The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot, 2012, etc.) with regret. “A common language—a language of the commons—is getting rarer.” He was dismayed when a new edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary eliminated words such as acorn, catkin, heather, and nectar in favor of blog, broadband, and voicemail to reflect, the publisher explained, “the consensus experience of modern-day childhood.” In this fascinating, poetic compilation of vocabulary invented to describe the natural world, the author aims to “re-wild our contemporary language for landscape” and enrich our “vibrancy of perception.” “Language is fundamental to the possibility of re-wonderment,” he writes, “for language does not just register experience, it produces it.” Throughout, Macfarlane chronicles his peregrinations across different landscapes, including flatlands, highlands, water, coast, and woods, sometimes in the company of friends, often with references to nature and travel writers he admires (Roger Deakin, John Stilgoe, and Barry Lopez, to name a few) and to earlier word researchers. Each chapter is followed by a glossary of terms for aspects of “land, sea, weather and atmosphere” gleaned from English, Gaelic, Cornish, Welsh, Breton, and other dialects of the British Isles. Readers will discover, for example, that a “bunny bole” names the entrance to a mine in Cornwall; a “lunky” is a “gap in a fence or dyke (big enough to let sheep through but not cattle)” in Galloway; “oiteag” is Gaelic for a “wisp of wind”; and in Shetland, “skub” describes “hazy clouds driven by the wind.” Macfarlane has found 50 words for various permutations of snow, including “ungive” to describe thawing, in Northamptonshire. Many terms, the author contends, function as “tiny poems that conjure scenes.”
Lucent, lyrical prose evokes Macfarlane’s aesthetic, ethical, and powerfully tactile response to nature’s enchantments.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-241-96787-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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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