Apparently undertaken as a textbook, Steinberg’s accessible survey will prove useful as a reference for green-inclined...
American history began not with Columbus’s landing, Jamestown, or even the peopling of the continent by PaleoIndians from Asia, but 180 million years ago, when the supercontinent called Pangaea began to disintegrate.
So Steinberg (History/Case Western Reserve Univ.) posits at the beginning of this readable, useful survey of US environmental history, which quickly shifts from climate and soil to take up the doings of PaleoIndians, Puritans, and pioneers. Steinberg makes a fine case for the importance of nature as an engine of history everywhere, but particularly on this continent, which, he notes, is both extraordinarily generous and extraordinarily harsh. Developing themes that extend throughout, he addresses matters that have only just begun to emerge with force in the professional literature. One is the vast reshaping of the environment due to the lifestyles of the prehistoric American Indians: “many coastal California environments,” he observes, “were human artifacts, the product of Indian burning, and would have reverted to woody vegetation had the native peoples not intervened.” Another is the devastating effect of livestock, and particularly cattle, on marginal environments such as the semi-arid southern plains; his long chapter called “The Secret History of Meat” is lively, even entertaining, and it is guaranteed to strip Steinberg of any potential chair at Hamburger University. Still another theme is the causal chain of unintended effects that follows our sweeping interventions in the environment; as Steinberg rightly warns after offering a raft of examples, “When it comes to the human control of nature, beware: Things rarely turn out the way they are supposed to.”
Apparently undertaken as a textbook, Steinberg’s accessible survey will prove useful as a reference for green-inclined readers in and out of school.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-19-514009-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
Exemplary writing about the world and a welcome gift to readers.
Distinguished natural history writer and explorer Lopez (Outside, 2014, etc.) builds a winning memoir around books, voyages, and biological and anthropological observations.
“Traveling, despite the technological innovations that have brought cultural homogenization to much of the world, helps the curious and attentive itinerant understand how deep the notion goes that one place is never actually like another.” So writes the author, who has made a long career of visiting remote venues such as Antarctica, Greenland, and the lesser known of the Galápagos Islands. From these travels he has extracted truths about the world, such as the fact that places differ as widely as the people who live in them. Even when traveling with scientists from his own culture, Lopez finds differences of perception. On an Arctic island called Skraeling, for instance, he observes that if he and the biologists he is walking with were to encounter a grizzly feeding on a caribou, he would focus on the bear, the scientists on the whole gestalt of bear, caribou, environment; if a native of the place were along, the story would deepen beyond the immediate event, for those who possess Indigenous ways of knowledge, “unlike me…felt no immediate need to resolve it into meaning.” The author’s chapter on talismans—objects taken from his travels, such as “a fist-size piece of raven-black dolerite”—is among the best things he has written. But there are plentiful gems throughout the looping narrative, its episodes constructed from adventures over eight decades: trying to work out a bit of science as a teenager while huddled under the Ponte Vecchio after just having seen Botticelli’s Venus; admiring a swimmer as a septuagenarian while remembering the John Steinbeck whom he’d met as a schoolboy; gazing into the surf over many years’ worth of trips to Cape Foulweather, an Oregon headland named by Capt. James Cook, of whom he writes, achingly, “we no longer seem to be sailing in a time of fixed stars, of accurate chronometers, and of reliable routes.”
Exemplary writing about the world and a welcome gift to readers.Pub Date: March 20, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-394-58582-6
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
PROFILES
IN THE NEWS
Jahren transcends both memoir and science writing in this literary fusion of both genres.
Award-winning scientist Jahren (Geology and Geophysics/Univ. of Hawaii) delivers a personal memoir and a paean to the natural world.
The author’s father was a physics and earth science teacher who encouraged her play in the laboratory, and her mother was a student of English literature who nurtured her love of reading. Both of these early influences engrossingly combine in this adroit story of a dedication to science. Jahren’s journey from struggling student to struggling scientist has the narrative tension of a novel and characters she imbues with real depth. The heroes in this tale are the plants that the author studies, and throughout, she employs her facility with words to engage her readers. We learn much along the way—e.g., how the willow tree clones itself, the courage of a seed’s first root, the symbiotic relationship between trees and fungi, and the airborne signals used by trees in their ongoing war against insects. Trees are of key interest to Jahren, and at times she waxes poetic: “Each beginning is the end of a waiting. We are each given exactly one chance to be. Each of us is both impossible and inevitable. Every replete tree was first a seed that waited.” The author draws many parallels between her subjects and herself. This is her story, after all, and we are engaged beyond expectation as she relates her struggle in building and running laboratory after laboratory at the universities that have employed her. Present throughout is her lab partner, a disaffected genius named Bill, whom she recruited when she was a graduate student at Berkeley and with whom she’s worked ever since. The author’s tenacity, hope, and gratitude are all evident as she and Bill chase the sweetness of discovery in the face of the harsh economic realities of the research scientist.
Jahren transcends both memoir and science writing in this literary fusion of both genres.Pub Date: April 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-87493-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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