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
A lively work on a somewhat arcane topic, and an important prehistory of our environmentally conscious, biologically...
An engrossing, unusual social narrative, documenting the close ties between chemical weapons development and “peaceful” applications in insect warfare.
Russell’s debut views the predominantly military history of the world wars and the Cold War as a metaphor for similarly volatile technological developments in the private sector. He explores how, despite the horror of indiscriminate gas warfare promulgated by all sides in WWI (here termed “The Chemists’ War”), a clique of ambitious scientists and soldiers in the Chemical Warfare Service created an advocacy culture that portrayed the frightening new technology as safer and more humane than the era’s gruesome trench-war stalemates. Such “gas boosterism” was checked by Depression-era public hostility towards the “merchants of death,” and by FDR’s horror of chemical warfare, evident in his “no-first-use” policy. This altered the service’s priorities, towards development of incendiary devices such as napalm, flame throwers, and cluster bombs; ironically, this shift made Allied bombing of German and Japanese cities especially devastating, much more so than gas warfare would have been. The most ingenious element of Russell’s approach may be seen in his even-handed exploration of how chemical warfare science influenced the civilian pest-eradication industry. He unearths startling cultural histories, such as how the military need to combat typhus and malaria fed the American enthusiasm for DDT, how the imagery and language of insect extermination fused with conceptions of “total war” to inure soldiers to massive killing (particularly regarding the Japanese), and how postwar science exploited Nazi development of organophosphates (powerful insecticides related to nerve gasses) for great profits and terrifying new weapons. He concludes by addressing the Cold War–era unease epitomized by Eisenhower’s warnings about the “military-industrial complex” and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), seeing both as warnings that an “elite class [had] lost sight of what they were ostensibly trying to protect” through endorsement of chemical warfare’s many forms.
A lively work on a somewhat arcane topic, and an important prehistory of our environmentally conscious, biologically threatened era.Pub Date: April 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-521-79003-4
Page Count: 303
Publisher: Cambridge Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2000
A fascinating study of how Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and James Madison applied science to their political thinking. In terms of scientific competence, Cohen (History of Science/Harvard Univ.) finds much to praise in Jefferson and Franklin. Jefferson the polymath persuaded George Washington to adopt his method of apportioning members to the House of Representatives rather than one proposed by Alexander Hamilton. The Declaration of Independence pays homage to Isaac Newton with its ``self-evident truths'' (i.e., axioms) and its opening lines concerning the ``Laws of Nature and Nature's God.'' Franklin's contributions to the field of electricity go well beyond flying a kite in a thunderstorm, Cohen shows. The French idolized him as a scientist and a self-made man, making him extraordinarily effective in ensuring French aid in 1776. Franklin also anticipated Malthus with statements about population growth in relation to sustenance, and he provided powerful demographic arguments as to why England should annex Canada after the French and Indian War. Adams, while well taught and an aficionado of science, got his physics wrong; he thought he was referencing Newton's laws of motion in speaking of the ``balance of powers'' or ``checks and balances'' in the Constitution, but the correct analogy is to laws of statics and equilibrium. Still, he foresaw a future for America in which his sons should master mathematics and practical sciences so that their children in turn could study painting, poetry, and music. In brief comments on The Federalist, Cohen notes that Madison's science metaphors were largely medical—a ``nerveless empire,'' an ``ailing government,'' etc. At times the text is repetitious; at times, Cohen wields a heavy hand in attacking earlier commentators (including Woodrow Wilson). Nevertheless, the founding fathers appear in an interesting new light, thanks to Cohen's fresh, not to say iconoclastic, vision.
Pub Date: July 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-393-03501-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
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