Over the past few decades, hardly a year has passed without my thinking of Malcolm X on his birthday. Reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965) in high school, I was moved enough by the book—especially when learning that Malcolm taught himself to read by copying the dictionary in prison—that I made a promise always to remember his birthday: May 19. I still have that high school copy of his autobiography.
Just imagine all the facts that are embedded in your brain from the books you’ve read. I hear the music of Brahms, one of my favorite composers, and I randomly think of how, as I read in Jan Swafford’s biography, Johannes Brahms (1997), the teenager from hardscrabble Hamburg wrote music in his head while walking in the woods. I see a coyote trotting down a street in California, and I remember Mike Davis’ writing in Ecology of Fear(1999): Sorry, suburbanites, predators were here before you. And when I come across a chessboard, I’m reminded that, for centuries, the game was played without a woman on the board—the queen eventually replaced the vizier, an adviser to the king. This I know thanks to Marilyn Yalom’s Birth of the Chess Queen (2004).
Many recent books are full of such enriching details. One is The Snakes That Ate Florida: Reporting, Essays, and Criticism (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Jan. 13) by the ever-curious Ian Frazier. The collection includes a piece on road salt in New York City. It turns out that the stuff comes from Chile’s Atacama Desert, the most arid spot on Earth.
About the planet: In Hrvoje Tkalčić’s When Worlds Quake: The Quest To Understand the Interior of Earth and Beyond (Princeton Univ., Jan. 13), we learn, writes our reviewer, “how plate tectonics regulate the climate by drawing down carbon deposits from the ocean floor, spewing it back into the atmosphere through volcanic eruptions. Meanwhile, the convection of liquid iron in the core produces the Earth’s magnetic field, which deflects solar wind and radiation.”
Reviewing Jessica Riskin’s The Power of Life: The Invention of Biology and the Revolutionary Science of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (Riverhead, March 24), our critic wrote, “Experiments find that an odor that mice smell in a state of fear—caused by electric shock—can generate fear of that odor in children and grandchildren who never received shocks.”
In The People Can Fly: American Promise, Black Prodigies, and the Greatest Miracle of All Time (Little, Brown, Feb. 3), Joshua Bennett writes that the young Stevie Wonder’s senses were so heightened that “There was a game he would play with visitors to the house: They would drop a coin on the kitchen table and he would identify it—quarter, nickel, penny, dime—based on the sound it made against the wood.”
That anecdote has me recalling this insight from Michael Pollan’s latest book, A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness (Penguin Press, Feb. 24): “Plants are known to emit low clicking sounds as their cells elongate and divide; it’s conceivable that they can sense the reflections of sound waves bouncing off objects such as metal poles. Much like a bat.” It’s safe to say there’s a lot left to learn about our world.
John McMurtrie is the nonfiction editor.
