Most Recent
Parasite Rex: Inside the Bizarre World of Nature's Most Dangerous Creatures (2000), by Carl Zimmer
Carl Zimmer, author of Parasite Rex, is a science journalist, which automatically makes me a little suspicious, at least initially, about the quality of a book. It isn’t that I don’t acknowledge the existence of a handful of truly superb science journalists, some of whom have written wonderful science books for nonspecialists -- but one does get frequently stung by authors insufficiently meticulous or insufficiently well-grounded in their subject discipline to do justice to the science they are reporting.
No danger of that here -- although there can be no denying that Zimmer’s book does sting.
As a preliminary matter, I should note that Zimmer writes with the authority of a practicing parasitologist. In addition, and invaluably, his account is heavily informed by his deep understanding of the processes and mechanisms of natural selection. Evaluating Parasite Rex purely as a knowledge-delivery device, it is simply not subject to criticism.
But the book is so much more than that. Zimmer is a very Stephen King of pop science, by which I do not mean to damn him with faint praise; Parasite Rex kept this reader on the edge of his seat, in an agony of suspense and terror, for the entire weekend it took to devour it from cover to cover. Zimmer knows what he is doing.
The first sections of the book relate a series of parasite life histories, examples of the complex, delicately-balanced, highly-specialized strategies modern parasitic organisms have evolved. The organizing principle behind these stories is clear, and it isn’t based on the taxonomies, strategies, or environments of either parasites or hosts -- Zimmer has selected these particular accounts, and the order in which he relates them, in order to bring the reader efficiently to a crescendo of visceral horror.
Most people tend to experience a strong reaction of disgust and aversion when presented with information about parasites; apparently we cannot help but empathize with an infested host, and to sympathize accordingly. Zimmer lays the examples on so thick, each more horrifying than the last, that reading his book becomes a sort of intellectual equivalent of hunkering down in a war zone.
My own particular favorite is the parasite Sacculina carcini, which makes its home inside a crab. It begins by sterilizing its host if it is female, and if the host is male, both sterilizing it and forcing it to produce hormones that render it behaviorally female. It then begins to infiltrate and replace the crab’s body, including much of its brain. The crab continues seeking food, which it feeds directly to its parasite. When Sacculina reproduces, it places its offspring in a pouch where the crab’s offspring would go (if the host is male, the parasite forms a pouch in the appropriate location). The crab acts to protect the parasite’s offspring just as it would its own -- and even carefully disperses them when it is time to do so, just as it would carriers of its own genetic heritage. This is the stuff of science fiction, a parasite that takes over everything and leaves only its host’s outer shell intact.
Nevertheless, it is perhaps still more horrifying to learn that many parasites of vertebrate hosts have evolved to produce (or cause their hosts to produce) neurotransmitters that tend to create behavior patterns that serve the parasite’s interests far more than the host’s. For example, if a parasite lives in a fish in one stage of its life cycle, but wants to be in a bird for the next, it makes its piscine host less afraid of shadows on the water, and more interested in feeding near the surface. Indeed, psychologists have found distinct behavior patterns -- different in males and females -- associated with being a human host to cysts of the parasite Toxoplasma. Toxoplasma wants its host to be eaten by a predator, so it makes males tend to be loners who resent authority, and makes females tend to be outgoing and overly-trusting. By the way, if, like me, you grew up with cats, you almost certainly host Toxoplasma yourself.
Having shattered his audience with such ghastly memes as these, Zimmer next begins to put some of the pieces back together. He mitigates the naked horror of the first chapters with an exploration of the role parasites and parasitism have played in the evolution of multi-cellular organisms. To a degree he overstates his case; if it is true that parasites are a third and in many ways causal factor in the well-known phenomenon whereby wolves cull the weak out of the caribou herd, it is not accurate to claim that the parasites are “the” drivers of evolution. It is, however, accurate to say that parasites co-evolved with both caribou and wolf, and that the role parasites generally have played in all natural selection has been consistently and systematically over-looked and under-considered in the evolution literature.
There is much of interest in the evolution section which I will not discuss here; rather I will confine myself to the final punchline: since medical science has begun successfully eradicating many kinds of parasites from the post-industrial human experience, new disorders have begun to emerge in response to the “missing” organisms. It seems that many parasites have developed a knack for toning down the effects of vertebrate immune systems. If the presence of such parasites was, on average, an evolutionary constant, then we can expect to have evolved immune systems that operate optimally only when the chemicals these parasites produce are present. Remove the parasites and the human immune system becomes too strong for its own good, and begins treating harmless material as pathogenic (consider the epidemic of allergies in post-industrial countries versus the nonexistence of allergies in the third world) or begins attacking its own body (i.e., newly-developed bowel ailments such as Crohn’s disease or irritable bowel syndrome).
(Parenthetically, I will note that by this point in the book, I was reading so fast, and was so stunned by sheer horror and revulsion that, even though I pride myself on my savviness regarding evolutionary theory, I must admit I didn’t see this discussion coming. I should have done so, since it is almost all so clearly correct that it seems “obvious” in retrospect.)
The reader is obliged in the end to adjust to life with the relatively abstract and alloyed horror induced by the knowledge that we in principle should not seek to eliminate parasites from the human experience. We might engineer them, subvert them to serve our interests just as they have done to us for millennia, but we ought not to eliminate them. Every gardener knows that it is clearing an area of its naturally-balanced flora that creates an opportunity for hyper-infestation of weed species; let’s hope medical science doesn’t continue forcing us to learn the same lesson with our own bodies.
[See also: AMZN - PWLS]

All Titles (reverse chronological order of publication)
The Farfarers: Before the Norse (1998), Farley Mowat
Farley Mowat is no fan of Received Wisdom.
In 1963 when he published his classic Never Cry Wolf (AMZN - PWLS), everyone knew that wolves were dangerous, even depraved killers. If it is now widely known that wolves are not dangerous to man, that they typically live in close-knit family groups, that they are intelligent, personable animals, it is largely thanks to Mowat, who consented to be dropped, alone, into the Canadian wilds to spend a season in close proximity with wolves in their natural habitat (at a time when experts agreed that to do so meant certain death). Nearly single-handedly, he changed the way the world thought about a species alongside which man has lived for millennia.
Similarly, in 1965, when he published Westviking (AMZN - PWLS), his examination of the evidence convinced a theretofore skeptical modern generation of the veracity of the Norse claim (in the Vinland Sagas) to have visited the North American continent.
However, his continued examination of the evidence over the subsequent thirty years -- both archeological and literary -- convinced him that the Vinland Sagas told only a portion of the story. And, indeed, after reading The Farfarers, I am convinced that once again, where Mowat has led mainstream scholarship will duly follow, this time to the conclusion that the Greenland Norse did not blaze the trail to Vinland any more than their forebears had blazed the trail to Iceland; in both cases, they followed a pre-Celtic European people Mowat refers to, collectively, as the "Albans."
It should be obvious, since it is largely his own theory that he is debunking, but I should nevertheless note that Mowat is a fact-driven rather than a theory-driven thinker. That is, he has not first proposed the idea that a farfaring culture existed, and then sought evidence which could be interpreted as supporting the theory; rather, he has spent years considering the evidence, identified the places where existing theories lacked plausibility, and sought more adequate interpretation. In what follows I will summarize, but radically simplify, his observations.
The first piece of the puzzle, chronologically if not logically, is that early medieval and even ancient maps frequently place a roughly Iceland-shaped island called "Ultima Thule" in the right area of the North Atlantic to be Iceland. The implication is that the Europeans knew about Iceland from antiquity, long before the island's ninth-century settlement by Northmen. Indeed, given the evidence, it is strange that scholars and historians could ever have concluded otherwise. Such is the power of Received Wisdom.
The next piece of evidence that Iceland was inhabited when the Northmen arrived is a great example of Mowat's ingenious "common" sense. There are references in the Vinland sagas to small numbers of white-robed people who were on Iceland when the Northmen arrived; the saga-writers claimed that these people "went away," not wanting to share the island with the newcomers. Scholarship has, from the beginning, made two inquiry-framing assumptions: (i) since Iceland was theretofore unknown to Europe, either the prior inhabitants were Irish monks who had drifted to Iceland on coracles or they didn't exist at all, and (ii) either the saga explanation that the clerics didn't want to share their solitude with brash newcomers can be taken at face value or the handful of monastics were slaughtered out of hand. However, no combination of these assumptions was ever truly plausible; the Irish "green martyrs" did not wear white robes, and where did all the early settlers' slaves come from, whose existence is well-attested in the sagas? Mowat's answer is that Iceland was occupied not by a handful of male clerics but rather by a people he calls the Albans (white-wearing people), who, he argues, had fled to Iceland to escape the depredations of the Northmen in the first place. Once expressed, it seems obviously more plausible than any prior explanation, but over centuries of scholarship and speculation, no one ever saw past the blinders of history.
Of more interest to Americans, of course, is the question of what evidence there is that these "skrælings" preceded the Norse to North America. Here Mowat relies on his re-interpretation of new world archeological evidence, informed and educated (unlike the views of most academic archeologists) by years of experience as a sailor and as a wilderness survivor. Briefly, he shows that what has always been interpreted as the foundations of Norse-style turf houses is more plausibly interpreted as the stone foundation of an Alban-style "boat-house," in which an inverted skin-boat is incorporated into the architecture of a semi-temporary dwelling. In addition, he shows continuity of structure among tall cairns of stones found in the new world and in the North Atlantic, as well as discontinuity between the new world cairns and anything produced by the Inuit or other native American peoples.
In sum, Mowat has done it again. My only quibble with this book is that each chapter is accompanied by a section of speculative fiction, a sort of imagined history of the Alban people. Mowat may have felt inclusion of the fictional account provided an intuition-priming illustration of his ideas, but the lack of support for the kind of speculative detail he alludes to in the fiction sections nettled my scholarly sensibilities. However, this is a minor point, and does not detract from the overall magnificent effect of the whole.
[See also: AMZN - PWLS]

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (1997), Jared Diamond
Guns Germs and Steel is scholarship in a class by itself. It is not only brilliant scholarship (and it is that -- even the speculation carries such a heavy weight of persuasion as to ring like authority); it is also an authoritative treatment of something of fundamental importance to understanding humankind.
But what is the great accomplishment of this ambitious book? Merely to explain, from first principles, why it is that Europeans have come to dominate the rest of the world militarily and culturally. And when I say first principles, I mean first principles: the elements of his argument are the geophysical structure of our planet's continents, the distribution of flora and fauna across them, and the initial distribution of the first anatomically modern humans.
Briefly, Diamond shows that the roughly east-west orientation of the temperate latitudes of the Eurasian continent (as opposed to the roughly north-south orientation of the temperate zones of all other continents), combined with the wide variety of domesticable animals and crop-plants to be found there when humans first arrived (far exceeding the variety to be found anywhere else in the world) gave Eurasians a massive temporal "headstart" over humans elsewhere in terms of developing agriculture and in transporting innovations in agriculture to other contiguous areas with similar climactic conditions. This led to the development of centers of dense population in Eurasia before such centers developed elsewhere -- in particular, the development of centers of dense population where humans lived in close association with non-human animals. This led not only to rapid technological advancement but also to resistance to a wide variety of diseases. This combination made Eurasians unbeatable. Given the layout of the continents and the distribution of flora and fauna useful to humans across them, assuming humans wherever found were "equal" in intelligence, creativity, industriousness and strength, one would predict a priori that the Eurasians would become dominant.
Why European dominance over Asians? Here, Diamond shifts mildly into the speculative. He notes that Europe is more broken up by an indented coastline and by mountains than is Asia, and concludes that Europe's geography lent itself to many competing autonomous cultures, whereas Asia's lent itself to a single, broad, monolithic culture. (Surely historical hindsight is polluting his argument with a little a posteriori reasoning here, but let us not quibble, the idea isn't ridiculous.) Technological innovation is more likely to take place, to flourish, and to spread, where there is local competition than where there isn't. Not a perfect explanation, but surely a large component of a complete explanation all the same.
It is possible to point to counter-evidence on a smaller scale, but at the broad level at which Diamond's argument is operative, it is unassailable.
Like most modern revolutionary scholarship, Diamond's methodology is cross-disciplinary in nature; his own specialty is ornithology -- specifically, of all things, avian physiology. This is not, however, as strange as it sounds, because in part it was his far-flung travels doing ornithology field-work that led him to put all of the pieces of his argument together. In any event, Diamond draws upon history, archaeology, biology, genetics, and ethnology to produce his grand thesis to explain thirteen millennia of the human experience.
In sum, I cannot recommend this book enough; it is destined to shape our collective understanding of human history at a profound level.
[See also: AMZN - PWLS]

War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage (1996), Lawrence H. Keeley
Although extremely poorly edited, this slim volume represents a revolution in understanding early human history.
The received wisdom in cultural ethnology is that true war was unknown to our species before the advent of so-called civilization. Not so; this book draws upon archeological and comparative ethnological data to show persuasively that bloody war has been a constant in human development up until the latter half of the twentieth century. Indeed, despite advancements in the technology of slaughter, and despite the cataclysmic events of the two world wars, on average the likelihood of death in battle has never, at any point in human evolution, been lower than at the present.
Much of the book is dedicated to an analysis of pre-civilization battle tactics (i.e., tribal tactics as observed during the modern period, ancient descriptions of tribal adversaries, inferences from the archeological record), and of their comparison with the methodologies of modern warfare. Keeley takes great pains to "defend" pre-civilization warfare as equally deadly and even "total" as any modern campaign.
Overall, this is fine scholarship, and important reading for anyone seeking to understand human culture or the conditions of human evolution.
[See also: AMZN - PWLS]

The Mismeasure of Man (1981; revised and expanded edition 1996), Stephen J. Gould
This book relates in exquisite detail the history of intelligence testing in the US and, in its early stages, in France. Bluntly, the enterprise of intelligence testing, whether by crude measurement of skull volume or in the supposedly more sophisticated form of testing by psychological instrument, was historically driven by a racist agenda -- which Gould is extremely persuasive in uncovering. From systematic bias in "error" to outright departure from the empirical method, Gould uncovers it all for the world to see, in his eminently readable style.
Gould also makes clear that the intelligence-testing psychological instruments in use today, however free modern practitioners may be of racial bias, are directly derived from instruments designed either for racist purposes or for the strict purpose of identifying developmental pathology (rather than the measure of normal intelligence). Thus, while the famous "IQ test" can truly be said to be measuring some statistical regularities in human performance, there is absolutely no basis for concluding that what is being measured is what we think of as "intelligence" -- or even anything particularly well-correlated with it.
Left for the reader to ponder for him- or herself is whether the central question of intelligence testing can even be intelligibly posed, or whether the whole enterprise is best relegated to the same slag-pile as phlogiston research and the search for the philosopher's stone [sorcerer 's stone to American readers].
The 1996 revised and expanded edition contains Gould's rebuttal to The Bell Curve.
[See also: AMZN - PWLS]

Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (1994), Antonio R. Damasio
As an erstwhile scholar of cognitive science who has since, perhaps regrettably, forsaken academia for industry, I still maintain a strong (and, I like to think, fairly well-educated) interest in the phenomenon known as mind. It is Damasio's findings I unfailingly return to again and again as I develop my own, now amateur, thoughts about consciousness.
Although I read Descartes' Error for a class while a graduate student in cognitive science at UCSD, it is definitely written for a lay audience. It opens with a description of Phineas Gage, a nineteenth-century man who survived having a crowbar shot through his brain by an explosion. Gage was celebrated for suffering no ill effects from his injury, although he had a clean hole all the way through his head. However, the small print of Gage's tale is that, despite having no measurable ill effects, after his injury he lost his job, his wife, his money and his friends, and died an unhappy drunkard.
Flash to the present. A neurological patient is referred to Damasio, a man who suffered a brain injury, but apparently recovered with no ill effects modern neuropsychology could detect, with even its subtlest tests. However, the man could no longer adequately perform his job, despite being to all appearances cognitively and emotionally normal. He was desperately trying to prove to his insurance company that despite all the negative tests, something was wrong with him. Damasio had encountered a modern Phineas Gage.
After his own battery of subtle but negative tests, Damasio finally found evidence of pathology with the following test, which he called "the Game of Life." Patients were instructed to draw cards from one of two decks, A or B, with the instruction that they were to try to maximize "gains." Deck A contained cards with large gains and large losses, but on average produced a net loss. Deck B contained modest gains and losses, with on average a net gain. Normal subjects playing this "game" would draw at random from the two decks, but after a few big losses from Deck A, would develop a galvanic skin response detectable with a polygraph device whenever they initiated a movement toward the cards from Deck A. After developing this response, normal subjects would predominantly elect to choose cards from Deck B, although most could not consciously explain why they did so.
Damasio's patient never developed this galvanic skin response.
Damasio therefore had the germ of a new theory of cognition, in which the entire nervous system, peripheral as well as central, has a role to play in even high-level decision-making. When asked in the abstract to make a decision, Damasio's patient was fully up to the task, but when confronted with the same situations in his real life, his decisions were effectively random. Damasio's theory was that the patient's inability to make intelligent decisions had nothing to do with his inability to handle problems cognitively, and everything to do with his seemingly trivial lack of a measurable physiological response to a problem situation.
Briefly, in real-life cognition, our peripheral nervous systems, which are nothing if not statistics engines par excellence, produce physiological reactions to the situations we confront, which we tend to classify as manifestations of our emotional states. Brain then relies on these apparently emotional responses to guide what we tend to classify as consciousness to what "feels" to us like rational, emotion-independent, reasoned decisions as to what action to take.
In other words, the physiological reactions of the human body to emotional events are not just byproducts of emotional states, but rather necessary components of reasoning itself. The human brain did not evolve to perform tasks of logical decision-making in the absence of cues from the body it co-evolved with.
The implications are breath-taking -- and consistent with all current theories of human reasoning. An important book, the impact of which modern cognitive neuroscience will be coming to grips with for years to come.
[See also: AMZN - PWLS]

Cadillac Desert: The American West and its Disappearing Water (1986; revised edition 1993), by Marc Reisner
Cadillac Desert is a vital classic, a Titan within the environmentalist canon. I am pleased to report that it deserves its enduring reputation.
...But let me assume that I am writing this "review" for an audience that is neither familiar with Reisner's book nor aware of the role water development has played in every aspect of the history of the American West, particularly of California.
Briefly, the history of water development contains the whole story of the West, from start to present. Early modern irrigation worked miracles and opened to the plow land previously unavailable for agriculture -- land that now feeds the USA as well as much of the rest of the world. If it were not for these early, massive hydro-projects, not one of the great cities of the West would be even conceivable, millions upon millions of people would and could never have considered settling the western half of the continent. Of course, there was a massive cost accompanying all of these benefits, measurable in human as well as environmental terms, but in those days the cost-benefit analysis was easy.
Building upon early irrigation successes, two government agencies -- the Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Corps of Engineers, may they both live forever in infamy -- garnered unto themselves massive power and independence, which they used to keep on building dam after dam after dam. The problem was not so much (at the time the dams were built) that the environmental costs were higher with every dam, until there now remains no wild river beyond the hundredth meridian of any significance whatsoever, precious little habitat for migratory birds, mass extinctions, etc., etc., tragically etc.; the real problem (at the time the dams were built) was that the new dams brought no benefits whatsoever to stack up against their costs. Each new dam represented gratuitous environmental catastrophe, effected simply because water projects became the currency of pork barrel Congressional politics.
And that's not the worst of it. Except for the Egyptian (the Nile River being a very special case), every civilization founded upon irrigation has always ended -- abruptly -- almost certainly due to the sudden and permanent despoliation of irrigated agricultural soil through concentration of salts, which is the inevitable result of irrigation. No previous irrigation civilization has ever worked on such a grand scale, or with soil already so alkaline, as ours. Death by salinity is happening with alarming rapidity in the American West even now. The end of agriculture as we know it in the West is coming, and coming soon; all the experts know it; nothing is being done.
Reisner doesn't suggest much in the way of solutions. But as history -- explaining patterns of human settlement, the effects of that settlement on the region's geography, the patterns of flow and accumulation of wealth in the West, and what may be the greatest crisis our whole nation is facing and ignoring today -- Cadillac Desert can't be beat.
[See also: AMZN - PWLS]

Uniquely Human: The Evolution of Speech, Thought, and Selfless Behavior (1991), Philip Lieberman
Lieberman was my unofficial mentor when I was an undergraduate at Brown University, and this is the one of his books that made the greatest impression on me. It describes in clear and convincing detail why, how -- and at what cost -- humans evolved not merely the cognitive but also the physiological capacity to use language and speech.
Briefly, Lieberman argues first that language and speech must have co-evolved (as opposed to the capacity for language coming first, perhaps being used in gestural modalities before the capacity for speech came about). The reasons for this are complex, but the gist of it is that a supra-laryngeal vocal tract that permits formation of the sounds of human speech is such a non-survival characteristic (adult humans are the only mammals incapable of breathing and drinking simultaneously (thus also rendering infants subject to SIDS in the period when the larynx drops), small mouth and small teeth make us work harder to ingest food, etc.) that it would never have evolved at all if the capacity to use language had co-evolved with some other adequate modality of language use. In addition, general principles of natural selection tell us that the cognitive capacity for language (probably) did not evolve independent of an ability to use language.
Next, Lieberman argues that the cognitive capacities that make language possible are the very same ones that make possible all of the cognitive "feats" that we consider to be particular to humankind: creativity and innovative thought, as well as our highly-developed hand-eye coordination and digital manipulation abilities.
In my view -- but not Lieberman's -- the third part of his argument is something of an afterthought, not a necessary part of his theory and more speculative than data-driven. However, it remains an extremely important and interesting speculative exercise, namely: what is the origin of "true" altruism (by which I mean something more than "kinship" or other, lesser forms of altruism)? Lieberman implies that the same brain areas that evolved to make efficient, linguistic, syntax-governed communication possible are the same ones responsible for true altruism, a trait found only in human beings (if even there!).
To summarize, this is Lieberman's most readable book, intended for a broad, lay audience, and functions as a terrific counterpoint both to hardline, evidence-be-damned non-Darwinian language theorists such as Chomsky and Pinker and to sloppy evolutionary psychology such as that espoused by Wright which fails to distinguish the (admittedly few) qualitative differences between human and nonhuman mammalian decision-making.
[See also: AMZN - PWLS]

Consciousness Explained (1991), Daniel C. Dennett
A complex, information-rich tome of mephistopholean hubris, in my view Consciousness Explained is the best example of philosophy in its role as "handmaiden to science" in decades, and probably the best example ever in the area of philosophy of mind.
This book is a great contribution to cognitive science; nevertheless, it is difficult to formulate a précis of its central hypothesis. To brutally summarize, Dennett's great insight is that consciousness is essentially an illusion of continuity generated by brain to make a coherent narrative out of temporally gappy or overlapping brain events processing sensory impressions, generating decisions, etc.
This is, however, a hard book for a lay reader to get through, and for that reason I recommend it only to the serious student of the cognitive sciences or of philosophy of mind.
[See also: AMZN - PWLS]

Bloodtaking and Peacemaking: Feud, Law, and Society in Saga Iceland (1990), William Ian Miller
I read this book while a student in Miller's semi-infamous class "Blood Feuds" at the University of Michigan Law School. I went into the class thinking that it would be interesting and fun, but that I wouldn't learn much from it, since I already had such an extensive familiarity with the Icelandic sagas: as an undergraduate I had translated some of them from Old Norse to English, and I had read most of the rest of them several times over in English translation.
Yes, it was interesting and yes, it was fun, but man! were my eyes opened as to how much I had to learn about the sagas and about the culture within which they were written.
There are two main reasons to read this book. First, to learn history. The history of ninth to fourteenth century Iceland is incredible, and the culture fascinating. Theirs was a culture that knew no central or even local government, no law enforcement infrastructure, and no arms control. And yet the Icelanders developed a complex system of law, essentially codifying the blood feud (which tradition still governs dispute resolution in places like Afghanistan and rural Macedonia), according to which civil injustice could be roughly corrected. Their example has much to teach us about human nature unadulterated by the State.
Second, Bloodtaking is an unparalleled gateway into the sagas as literature. Despite my intimate familiarity with every line of, for example, Hrafnkel's saga, until I read Miller's book I had only the most inadequate appreciation for how tightly it is constructed, how elegantly and efficiently it was drafted. The sagas are only vaguely comparable to the very best English-language short stories; the skill that went into them is comparable to that of a Dante or a Shakespeare.
A modern reader is not culturally prepared to receive the sagas as they would have been by a medieval Icelander. Miller's book provides the small set of cultural factoids that create relevance where otherwise detail might seem pointless or obscure, and reveals the saga-writers' penchant for humorous understatement and emphasis by ellipse. Armed with a relatively small set of cultural facts and with an eye for a small set of saga tropes, the reader has access to a whole new literary world.
Whatever your bent, Bloodtaking makes for fascinating reading.
[See also: AMZN - PWLS]

How Monkeys See the World: Inside the Mind of Another Species (1990), Dorothy L. Cheney and Robert M. Seyfarth
I read this book in connection with graduate coursework under Seyfarth at the University of Pennsylvania. Cheney and Seyfarth describe a fascinating line of research on primates, mainly but not solely their own work on vervet monkeys. The goal is to form an account of the mind of the nonhuman primate -- how much do they understand about themselves, about other minds, and about the world?
I think that these are questions that fascinate almost all of us. What would it be like to be very nearly as intelligent as a human being, but to lack language (not merely a means of communication but also a way of formulating knowledge -- therefore a modality of knowing)? It is, of course, impossible ever to understand as a monkey understands or to feel as a monkey feels, but there is no better way to learn what a monkey can know or feel than Cheney and Seyfarth's engaging book.
[See also: AMZN - PWLS]

In Trouble Again: A Journey Between the Orinoco and the Amazon (1988), Redmond O'Hanlon
O'Hanlon is an academic, really; the natural history editor of the Times Literary Supplement and a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. Furthermore, he claims to look like Benny Hill, a claim borne out by his book-jacket photographs.
He is, therefore, an entirely unlikely candidate for the outrageous adventures he gets himself into while traveling.
I have read a handful of his accounts, and they are all completely mad. But I have to conclude that this is the best of the lot.
Briefly, this is the account of his travels through Amazonia, in a small wooden boat, ultimately to the homelands of the Yanomami (the "Fierce People" in Napoleon Chagnon's memorable phrase). Everyone O'Hanlon meets is terrified of the violent, unpredictable Yanomami, and he is hard pressed to find anyone to accompany him on his journey. When he finally meets them, he loses no time before joining them in a blast or two of hallucinogenic ebene, afterwards falling into a stupor while gazing lustfully at the local chief's young daughter.
Anyone could make these adventures interesting to read. After treatment by a writer of O'Hanlon's skill and humor, the book is impossible to put down until it has been drained to its dregs.
[See also: AMZN - PWLS]

The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986), Richard Rhodes
This Pulitzer prize-winning volume is not merely a thorough exposition of a crucial moment in human history -- it is also an excellent survey of the state and development of theoretical physics in the first half of the twentieth century.
The book is widely acknowledged by historians and physicists alike to be the authoritative description of the intrigue, decision-making, politicking and science that culminated in the creation of the atomic weapons that ended the second world war. To that endorsement I can only add that it is well and engagingly written. Indeed, I read it in the context of a reading group whose members represented widely different educational and professional backgrounds, and to all appearances it held everyone's rapt attention and interest equally.
Adding to his work's value as history is the skillful manner in which Rhodes poses the question of the ethics of using the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- not by framing the question in terms of his own but, far more appropriately, by the journalistic device of relating the events, the decisions that were made, and the commentary of the witnesses and principals, and permitting the reader to frame the questions for him- or herself.
[See also: AMZN - PWLS]

Jesus the Magician: Charlatan or Son of God? (1978), by Morton Smith
Morton Smith died while I was pursuing an unofficial undergraduate "minor" in earliest Christianity, so I saw firsthand the effect of his passing on (a set of) his peers, most of whom, it turns out, are believers. Although Smith's views are frightening and sometimes even repugnant to the faithful, his work commands a real (and not always grudging) respect among Christian scholars.
Smith's method is heavily comparative, analyzing the four Gospel accounts of the life of Jesus in terms of choice of language and expositional technique, and comparing them to contemporaneous rabbinical and Hellenic writing. Granting a very few premises -- such as, that Jesus and his followers did not conceive of themselves as representative of a wholly new historical paradigm, but rather as a part of their own cultural context, a premise quite consistent with the decisions they made in describing themselves and Jesus -- the resulting historical account is virtually unassailable, and powerfully compelling. The most controversial aspect of Smith's results is the theory that Jesus thought of himself as a "magician", in the sense that that word was used 2000 years ago in the Levant, in addition to -- but very much overlapping with -- his roles as a religious teacher and political revolutionary.
In conclusion, Smith's combination of maverick scholarship and conservative methodology leaves the reader unswervingly convinced that his account is how it must have been.
[See also: AMZN - PWLS]

Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness (1968), Edward Abbey
Well-beloved and much-reviled prophet of the wilderness and of the wild places, Abbey, like his œuvre, covers a lot of ground. Desert Solitaire is probably his best work -- a statement Cactus Ed would spiritedly deny (right before busting my head with a rock).
Conceived mainly while Abbey worked as a ranger in Arches National Monument (now National Park), the book is, in turns, a poetic evocation of the desert, a clownish middle finger upthrust into the face of the cosmos, a tirade against middle-America, and, above all else, an uncompromising voice bawling itself hoarse on behalf of nature.
Do not misunderstand me; Abbey was no environmental activist, nor was he above decorating the Eisenhower Highways with his empty beer cans. Abbey howled for freedom; freedom from the tyranny of roads and universal access, freedom from development, freedom from the encroachment of the city and its ungainly cousin the suburb, freedom from any form of regulation or oversight... up to and including laws against littering.
None of this has ever prevented the old iconoclast from becoming a patron saint of the environmental movement. Nor should it have done. Perhaps he littered the roads, but I love the cranky old bastard all the same. But for Abbey, how would I -- or any other member of my generation -- know what was lost when they flooded Lake Powell? Resist much, obey little -- and give Abbey's road a try.
[See also: AMZN - PWLS]

Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (1964), Mircea Eliade
Eliade's book is widely acknowledged to be the definitive work of scholarship on shamanism. It deserves its reputation.
Shamanism is mostly comparative anthropology, describing shamanistic systems from all over the world and relating them to what Eliade considers to be the paradigmatic type, namely, Siberian shamanism.
The shamanic universals are of considerable interest in themselves, not just as evidence of some ancient pan-cultural Ur-religion (although as such they also make interesting thought-fodder). They include initiation experiences (almost always involving the oneiric dismemberment of the shaman by demons), a history of self-healing (frequently the young shaman must and does cure himself of epilepsy or some other such condition), equipment and regalia used, beliefs about the nature and structure of the spirit world, and the claim by twentieth-century practitioners that a few generations back some catastrophe caused a degeneration in the powers shamans are able to command.
The portrait Eliade evokes of the practicing shaman is fascinating, but I have to admit that I read this book as much for insight into the interaction between the human brain and mind as for anthropology. Admittedly dry at times, Shamanism more than repays the effort required to take it in.
[See also: AMZN - PWLS]

Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West (1953), Wallace Stegner
Stegner is a prolific historian of the American West, as well as a prolific author of fiction. To my mind, his nonfiction is always a notch better than even the best of his fiction; to my mind, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian is the best of the lot.
To be sure, my view that this one is his best is likely colored by my impression that it treats the most important issues dealt with within Stegner's œuvre, namely, the question of water use in the American West. However, independent of the book's importance in understanding the history of water use, it is also a rollicking adventure tale of a one-armed madman shooting hellacious rapids the likes of which our continent no longer knows, while strapped to a wooden boat.
Powell was a brilliant, eccentric man, and the United States would be a better place if the policies he suggested had been intelligently implemented (rather than first ignored and subsequently mis-applied). His life is well worth learning about.
[See also: AMZN - PWLS]

xaosdog > amicis canis > media > nonfiction