It’s bonfire season here in the Fort Valley. I live in a forest, and that forest is full of dead and downed wood. Motivated by a desire to (a) reduce forest fire risk and (b) clear out some of the area under the trees for unobstructed recreation, I gather it up and periodically burn it … Read more
Over the weekend, I finished an excellent popular summary of genetics, The Gene: An Intimate History, by Siddhartha Mukherjee. It’s an excellent, thoughtful, current tome, that covers everything from Mendel to Darwin to Lysenko to Rosalind Franklin to CRISPR, written in a personal, accessible way. He begins and ends with a trip to India, examining … Read more
In the past couple of months I listened to the audiobook versions of Ernest Cline’s two novels. They are of a common piece, and so I opt to review them in tandem. There is a feeling I have that I am increasingly at odds with the students I teach in terms of cultural references and … Read more
I’ve let my subscription to the New Yorker lapse, but before I did, I was pleased to read each week its diverse suite of authors on a diverse suite of topics. This has been a source of surprising delight on several occasions, and has allowed me to discover not only topics I never thought to … Read more
I probably should have read this book eight years ago when it was first published, but somehow I missed it then. I recently heard the author, Susan Jacoby, on the podcast Point of Inquiry, and was impressed at the cannon of works she had produced. The current U.S. election cycle has spurred me to think … Read more
Lab Girl, by Hope Jahren, is a unique memoir. It describes Jahren’s journey through life from her childhood in the frigid northern Midwest to her eventual success as a celebrated scientist and an original thinker. The first thing you should know about it is that it is exceptionally well written (Hope Jahren Sure Can Write, … Read more
Sapiens is one of the most fascinating books I’ve read in a long time. It was a best-seller, and the adjectives in the many reviews you can find online are all equally accurate: “highly intellectual and compulsively readable,” “encyclopedic … concise but eloquent, both skeptical and opinionated.” The book takes as its mission a survey … Read more
The Heezen and Tharp (1977) World Ocean Floor Panorama is an amazing map – an ideal amalgam of science and art. It is the result of a collaboration between Bruce Heezen and Marie Tharp, in conjunction with artist Heinrich Berann, made a beautiful map that brought a state-of-the-art-as-of-1978 understanding of the seafloor immediately into the … Read more
A quick report today on a delightful book – The Floating Egg: Episodes in the Making of Geology, by Roger Osborne. It’s a collection of pieces, some only a few sentences long, others full essays, and still others short stories that fictionalize real life events. The range of styles is extensive, but what unites them … Read more
David Montgomery is a professor of geomorphology at the University of Washington, in Seattle. I’m a fan of his work in soil conservation and countering creationism, so I was very pleased to find myself sharing the “honoree” table with him in Vancouver the year before last, at the annual awards luncheon for the National Association … Read more
Here’s a great book about one family’s efforts to eat as locally as possible for a year, sort of. Whether or not they’re evangelical enough in their southwest Virginia locavory (I would have made the same call with regard to olive oil and coffee!), Barbara Kingsolver and her family definitely are certainly inspiring. Their efforts … Read more
This is the second Andrea Wulf book I’ve read in the past month. It’s a biography of a great naturalist and popularizer of science and travel writing, who at the same time is largely forgotten in the modern English speaking world. Alexander von Humboldt’s intellectual impact is vast, Wulf argues, leading to everything from Darwin’s … Read more
I just finished an interesting book with a provocative title. How to Clone a Mammoth, by Beth Shapiro, is a readable, sober assessment of de-extinction, the idea of bringing back extinct species through a variety of techniques. She defines very clearly at the outset that the purpose of de-extinction is ecological – to restore critical … Read more
I just finished this book, about the botanical and agricultural predilections of United States ‘founding fathers’ George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and James Madison. Three of these farmed and gardened in Virginia, one in Massachusetts. Some were federalists, others republicans who championed the rights of the states. Some were slave owners, others not. All … Read more
Probably the most important book I ever read was Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire. It opened my eyes to a passionate, unapologetic way of living in the world, of embracing visceral experience of the natural world. It spoke to my heart in an authentic way, and changed my world view permanently. I was in college then. … Read more
I have a great book to recommend today – a book that takes a “Great Books” approach to tracking the advance of western science through history. The book is called, straightforwardly, The Story of Western Science. Its author is Susan Wise Bauer, who writes with a confident erudition and a clear, solid style. She surveys … Read more
While I’ve spent quality time in Ireland on previous trips, I’ve never been to Scotland. To me, it is terra incognita, and I am eager to explore it this summer. It was with delight then, that I delved into David Oldroyd’s The Highlands Controversy, which at once tickled many parts of my brain: the structural … Read more
I’ve been doing some reading lately to get some foundational ideas established in my mind for my upcoming summer trip to Europe. This trip has three goals: (1) to gather key digital imagery (GigaPans, 360° photospheres, video) for curriculum to teach geoscience concepts and give students everywhere with particularly instructive geology in Iceland, Ireland, the … Read more
There’s something about Arctic and Antarctic adventure that stirs my interest. The merciless but fascinating environment, the odd fauna, the endurance, The Endurance, the way human frailties pop out against the stark backdrop. Evidently novelist Rebecca Hunt is subject to the same entrancement. She was one of 18 artists and writers who participated in the … Read more
How much thought have you given to the consequences of achieving an non-biological intelligence? If you’re like me, you’ve thought about the notion in a Hollywoodized sense, but once you get out of the cinema showing the latest Terminator film, you might not dwell on the topic too much further. I’ve given artificial intelligence (AI) … Read more