One doesn’t have to be a bird enthusiast to relish this book, but it would be the most perfect gift for anyone who is.
A thrilling voyage through what most of us think of as an ordinary item sold at the supermarket.
Birkhead (Animal Behavior and History of Science/Univ. of Sheffield; Bird Sense: What It’s Like to Be a Bird, 2012, etc.), an expert in the reproductive biology of birds, takes readers on an outside-to-inside journey through an egg. Before launching his trip, the erudite and entertaining British author introduces egg collecting, a now-forbidden pastime that began in the 17th century with wealthy amateurs filling private cabinets with beautiful eggshells, many of them plundered from guillemot nests on the cliffs of Skomer of South Wales. Turning to eggs themselves, Birkhead tells how the outside is formed and what lovely shapes and beautiful colors shells can make. Each chapter moves inward, focusing next on the protective albumin and then the huge, food-filled yolk. Finally, the author provides a chapter on the laying of the egg, its incubation, and the hatching of the chick. This is no basic biology text, however. Birkhead, an accomplished popular science writer, is also an authority on the history of science. The journey through the egg is full of side trips into earlier times and related stories. It seems that even Aristotle and William Harvey found eggs puzzling, and although researchers today, equipped with scanning electron microscopes, have revealed many of the egg’s mysteries, the remaining gaps in knowledge are significant. What makes this book such a pleasure is not just the author’s breadth of knowledge—he has researched guillemots for more than 40 years—but his unbridled enthusiasm and the clarity of his explanations. The black-and-white illustrations are simple and clear, and the backmatter includes a helpful glossary for general readers as well as extensive notes, a bibliography, and a list of birds mentioned in the text.
One doesn’t have to be a bird enthusiast to relish this book, but it would be the most perfect gift for anyone who is.Pub Date: April 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-63286-369-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
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
Ackerman writes with a light but assured touch, her prose rich in fact but economical in delivering it. Fans of birds in all...
Science writer Ackerman (Ah-Choo!: The Uncommon Life of Your Common Cold, 2010, etc.) looks at the new science surrounding avian intelligence.
The takeaway: calling someone a birdbrain is a compliment. And in any event, as Ackerman observes early on, “intelligence is a slippery concept, even in our own species, tricky to define and tricky to measure.” Is a bird that uses a rock to break open a clamshell the mental equivalent of a tool-using primate? Perhaps that’s the wrong question, for birds are so unlike humans that “it’s difficult for us to fully appreciate their mental capabilities,” given that they’re really just small, feathered dinosaurs who inhabit a wholly different world from our once-arboreal and now terrestrial one. Crows and other corvids have gotten all the good publicity related to bird intelligence in recent years, but Ackerman, who does allow that some birds are brighter than others, points favorably to the much-despised pigeon as an animal that “can remember hundreds of different objects for long periods of time, discriminate between different painting styles, and figure out where it’s going, even when displaced from familiar territory by hundreds of miles.” Not bad for a critter best known for bespattering statues in public parks. Ackerman travels far afield to places such as Barbados and New Caledonia to study such matters as memory, communication, and decision-making, the last largely based on visual cues—though, as she notes, birds also draw ably on other senses, including smell, which in turn opens up insight onto “a weird evolutionary paradox that scientists have puzzled over for more than a decade”—a matter of the geometry of, yes, the bird brain.
Ackerman writes with a light but assured touch, her prose rich in fact but economical in delivering it. Fans of birds in all their diversity will want to read this one.Pub Date: April 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59420-521-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
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