Category Archives: Book review

The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History, a review

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Ned Blackhawk’s book, “The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History”, is not just another history of the clash between European colonizers and Native peoples. It is a book of relationship, how over time, this country has gained much of its current and evolving form, from the extended conflict between us and native peoples, from their refusal to acquiesce, who have instead demanded that this country recognize native sovereignty and honor the treaties made between us, treaties which, along with our Constitution, are the ‘supreme law of the land’. Some of the most momentous changes to this country, its policies, laws and court decisions, resulted from these ongoing conflicts and this country’s attempts to resolve them. I was unaware of this book, and Blackhawk, until I read a review he wrote of Hamalainen’s, “Indigenous Continent” which I’d just finished. Continue reading →

The Dawn of Everything: The History of Humanity; a Review

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David Graber, an anthropologist, and David Wengrow’s, an archeologist, book, “The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity”, is more than ‘just’ a history of humanity, which would on its own suggest a massive tome of thousands of pages. it is an examination of how we ‘do’ history drawing many examples of peoples and societies across time from the Paleolithic through the colonization of North America. It is not simple reportage, rather a look into the correctness or accuracy, of how we have been telling history. I enjoy such questions and their capacity to rock the academic and intellectual ‘boat’. My reading has spurred the formation of links to two other books I’ve read recently, Stephen Jay Gould’s, “The Burgess Shale” and Pekka Hamalainen’s, “Indigenous Continent”. All three of these call into question previously widely accepted thinking on their subjects. More than this, they question foundational ideas upon which the science they examine are founded. This appeals to me. But more than this, there is an idea central to them all which really rings ‘true’ for me. Continue reading →

Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America, A Review

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We live today in a very divided and polarized world. You can take almost any characteristic used to define a group of people today and it is now being used to separate and divide. We do this sometimes out of pride, others, out of fear and desperation. We thus define our individuality, or our ‘people’, in a process of reduction, eliminating variation and possibility. This is who I am. This is my world, the world that matters. When we do this our world shrinks. That outside of it, becomes a threat and ‘threats’ proliferate. The causes of our problems are commonly reduced to ‘them’. Most of the divisions are, however inconsequential. Having been pried open we find ourselves separated by seemingly giant rifts, animosities greatly exaggerating the actual differences. Too many ‘leaders’, in bids to gain power themselves and cement their own advantage, beat the drums of division, gaining followers, customers and believers to their cause…which is often something very different than what they may publicly say. A world built on such differences is a precarious one, as groups strive for security by focusing on the differences rather than on the infinitely more common shared links which join us. This country was, in many ways, built on such differences. Continue reading →

Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History, A Review

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I am a newbie to the writing of Stephen Jay Gould, a paleontologist who has attracted a sizable share of critics and detractors for his reasoned and outspoken views on our understanding of evolution, the history of science, humanism and  ‘Man’s’ place in the overall scheme of things. I find this book an ‘eyeopener’. Previously my education on the topic of evolution has been casual, incidental, social, something I’ve observed and absorbed as a product of living my own life, a book here and there, not formal or studied. Over the last ten years or so I have been more focused on the science of life, that defining ‘force’ which animates all organisms, what it is to be alive at a time when the traditional divisions between the sciences, particularly between physics, biochemistry, what has come to be known as ‘systems science’ and cell biology are beginning to dissolve and merge. Science continues down its more traditional pathways with its atomistic, reductionist, approach, which has dominated most of the accepted work up until today. Under the ‘old rules’ scientists utilize what we understand as the ‘scientific method’ in which they conduct ‘controlled’ experiments, repeatedly, to understand a particular action or process. Such demand for control leads them to break problems down into limited, often tiny ‘bits’, in which it is more easy to examine and evaluate a single isolated process with ‘confidence’. Others then assemble all these bits that they’ve learned into a theory of the whole. Traditionally conducted science works from the idea that we can understand the whole by studying a problem in its parts, often ever more minute. While this has proven to be a very valuable strategy, improving our understanding, shaping the way we act in the world and our technologies, it has also become more evident that this approach has left something out, that by limiting our examination of life in this way we are missing something essential. What actually constitutes life? The study of life’s origin and its evolution expose the shortcomings of relying on this approach alone. Continue reading →

The Owls of the Eastern Ice:A Quest to Find and Save the World’s Largest Owl, Jonathan Slaght, a review

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Slaght holding one of the Blakiston's Fish Owls they captured and released.This is a story about the effort to understand and protect Blakiston’s Fish Owl, the largest owl in the world and its endangered population living in the Russian territory of Primorye Krai which lies along the Sea of Japan, north of the Russian port city of Vladivostok. It is a remote, sparsely settled and wild place, isolated from the rest of the world, and Russia as well, at a latitude close to our own, stretching 559 miles, between 42º and 48º north latitude. The author, Jonathan Slaght, a PhD candidate at the time, spent years in Primorye first in the Peace Corps and later working on a variety of wildlife projects before he took on the owls, a several years long study he undertook in association with the University of Minnesota, teaming up with Russian experts, and a loose international group of others doing research on other species resident there, like the Amur Tiger. His crew of Russian field workers, most of them hunters, skilled sportsmen, skilled as well in traveling through the wild landscape and survival there, were invested in the work they were doing. These people become his friends over the several years, despite or maybe because of their quirks, while both assisting and ‘training’ him as they do their primarily winter field work, under very harsh and often dangerous conditions, gathering data in the long months he spent back in the US. Along the way he lays out the work he must do to create an effective conservation plan, the goal of which was to secure the owl’s future, an owl about which relatively little was known. Continue reading →

Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human, A Review

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The cell is the basic, irreducible, unit of life. Whether an organism is animal, plant, fungal or bacterial, the cell is its basic unit. While it can be broken down into its ‘parts’ for examination, none of those parts are capable of independent life, none are able to continue fulfilling their functions on their own. The cell and its ‘community of parts’ operate as a ‘social’ unit, as a whole. Each ‘part’ fulfills one or more roles in the ongoing life of the cell. This book is a review of cell biology, of the development of our, human, understanding of the life of the cell and its centrality to our understandings of what it is be alive, how it has and continues to transform our practice of medicine. The author, Siddhartha Mukherjee, is a doctor and researcher who has spent his professional life studying blood and its cancers, trying to understand and treat disease. Continue reading →

Fen, Bog and Swamp: A Short History of Peatland Destruction and Its Role in the Climate Crisis , a Review

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For another review: link

Novelist Annie Proulx, begins her book with her childhood, giving us an idea of who she is, her attachments to the living world. She takes us with her on a walk she took with her mother as a young girl, through the neighborhood wilds, to an ignored patch of swampland. Her mother loved such places. She places her story in the larger story of the times of her birth and coming of age, of the 1930’s and the cruelties we perpetrated on each other and our limited view of the natural world, a world set as a table before us, for our consumption. She writes of her attachments to these abused and devalued wet landscapes, their necessity for a healthy natural world and what their loss means. Earlier, I reviewed Edward Struzik’s book “Swamplands”. Struzik has spent years working with researchers and conservationists in the field, and writing of his experiences. Proulx’s approach is much more personal as she works to place bogs, fens and swamps into a human, historical and cultural context. Continue reading →

Swamplands: Tundra Beavers, Quaking Bogs and the Improbable World of Peat, a Review

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The idea of individuality and control, key elements of the American psyche, are a self-deception. We can take an individual action, guided by an intention, and see its effect in the world around us, but after that, the first ‘tier’ of effects, there are secondary, tertiary and others beyond them, as what we have effected spreads out across space and time, effecting those things, beyond our focus, that nevertheless are in relationship, and do and must respond. If we’re paying attention we can see them and attribute them to others, unaware of our impact. The world is so large and complex, while we individually, commonly see ourselves as relatively ineffectual. We often don’t recognize our own agency and how collective effects propagate from our action. This can also support the idea we ‘can’t’, in a significant way, damage the systems and cycles that support life on Earth. What we must understand though is, that as members of societies and cultures, which share economies and technologies, our ‘individual’ actions are ‘shared’, they are multiplied, often many millions of times. We act individually, but we have tremendous collective impacts. By denying this we deny individual responsibility, which in effect, is a cultural denial, permitting the negative impacts to continue. “It’s just me!” “It doesn’t matter.” “It’s their responsibility, not mine!” These collective problems are then left unaddressed.

It is easy to believe this way. There is so much beyond our own control, so many problems, that it must be this way right? No. We are responsible, collectively. We never truly act independently, because we live in relationship with those around us and their, and our, influence over one another blur. Like it or not, we are a part of a larger society. To go against the conventions and norms of society, to act independently, is risky, to ourselves and the world around us…a risk which can bring with it changes, either positive or destructive. However, going ‘along with’ the norms and conventions of society, unquestioningly, is to possibly continue a potentially destructive practice. We are responsible. We have necessary roles o play. We have been relatively bad as a society at discussing our wider actions, of working to understand our impacts and insuring the security of life and its necessary conditions. Too often we comply, go along and continue doing those things simply because we ‘always’ have, forgetting that as our numbers and use continues to grow, so does the potency of our impact. We have been habitually confusing short term gain and comfort, with longer term survival and good. The consequent results of those unexamined actions can become devastating. To continue ignoring our negative impacts on others, in its broadest sense, is ultimately a threat to our own well being and security. Uninformed actions, actions taken selfishly at other’s expense, threaten the whole, because of the ubiquitous and pervasive connections to the world and between all people, places and organisms. Our denials will not change this. So, why do I bring this up? This is a gardening/horticultural post…because, what we do, or don’t do, in our gardens and across our shared landscapes, has impacts well beyond their borders. Continue reading →

Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic, David Quammen, WW Norton & Co.,2012; a Review

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If you were perusing the library shelves and came across this book, the title “Spillover” may leave you a little uncertain in terms of its topic, without reading the subtitle and having some understanding of the processes described in the book, the emergence, evolution and ecology of ‘new’ diseases, human diseases. When we speak of them we understand them as conditions, assaults on our health and human bodies, which result in an array of symptoms, with wide ranging severity, ranging from mild and asymptomatic; to bothersome with knowable, short lived cycles; through chronic and debilitating; to those entailing a series of feverish cycles we simply must endure; to those often painful and fatal which wreck havoc on our systems and organs. Quammen, the author, is as always, an intelligent and thorough researcher able to interpret complex topics for the layman while staying true to the science and the people whose stories he tells as he weaves together the larger narrative. Continue reading →

The Way of the Cell: Molecules, Organisms and the Order of Life – A Review (Read This Book if any of the Life Sciences are of even remote interest to you)

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I’m an integrator, a contextual learner and a big picture kind of guy. I am willing to ‘slog’ through the details, the analyses of experts, to understand what is going on, when the details help me understand, in this case, the operation or ‘life’ of the whole organism. What are the processes, how do they influence one another and how does that result in the condition we recognize as the dynamic, animated phenomenon of living. Franklin Harold, a professor emeritus in biochemistry at Colorado State University when he wrote, “The Way of the Cell: Molecules, Organisms and the Order of Life”, in 2003, has produced the ‘best’, and most comprehensible, review I’ve found of the life in the cell, to date. This book does not require an advanced degree to follow. It requires an interest in biology. A botanist, horticulturist or even avid gardener pursuing a more thorough understanding of what life is and what is occurring within the plants and animals around will find much that is accessible to them here. This book is not a slog. It is readable and readily comprehensible, though for those with less of a science background, a little more challenging, but hey, nothing ventured, nothing gained. The jargon he uses I would say is necessary. Science can be very precise in how it views its subject, necessarily so, because meaning becomes lost when the precision of language is too generalized. I’m adding it to my own library. I include some extensive quotes here to give you a sense of his style and philosophy. I also gleaned much from these particular passages. In school I endured too many professors and lecturers who seemed more interested in impressing their students with their own brilliance, and our inferiority, and came to relish those who were true teachers, who were able to impart to their students, there own love and fascination with their topic. Harold is one of these. He set out to write a book that would reach out to the reader making his topic more accessible, more comprehensible and thus widen the circle of understanding…and he has succeeded.

The cell, scientists would agree, is the smallest fully functional unit of an organism, any organism. It is the basic structural unit that has been joined together to create larger, more complex organisms. If you attempt to reduce it any further, divide it into its component parts, which science typically does in its process of reduction to understand it in its parts, it loses functionality and dies. Single celled organisms, bacteria, archae, and the larger single celled eukaryotic organisms, like amoebas, comprise the majority of living species on earth, by both number of species and by sheer mass. They are as complete as any single organism, like ourselves, a Redwood or Blue Whale, can be. Whether a single celled organism or a massive multi celled organism made up of several billions of many thousand ‘types’ of different specialized cells, almost all cells are capable of all of their essential functions, as long as they are supplied with proper nutrients and flows of energy. Cells, as Harold describes them, are highly coordinated ‘societies’ comprised of many millions of individual proteins, enzymes, lipids and ions, with various forms of RNA, bound within a protective, limiting and self-regulating membrane, often with other internal membranes, which protect and allow other more specialized functions within the cell…and DNA, or in the cases of some bacteria, RNA, which contain the ‘code’ which prescribes the organism. It is within the cell membrane where the particular mixes of their constituent parts are held in dynamic flux, where the ‘work’ of living occurs. Within what was once described as a ‘soup’ of chemicals, suspended within a virtual sea of water, the cell conducts the ‘business’ of life. Today we understand that within a single cell water molecules far out number any other substance. Cells possess a complex internal structure, a cytoskeleton, grown from proteins, that is integral to the transport of metabolites, the regulation of its thousands of internal processes, the structure of the cell itself and essential to its ability to respond and move. The actions within the cell are largely self-regulating, influenced, certainly, by outside, and internal energy gradients. The various reactions influence the rate of other reactions in a complex system of feedback loops, with a ‘logic’ often compared to that utilized by a computer. Processes are chemical, electrical and ‘mechanical’ as one reaction induces a conformational change, a change in ‘shape’, of a particular protein or enzyme, which directly influences what it can do. These changes in ‘shape’ act as effective ‘switches’ within the cell, switches operating amongst thousands of other such switches, creating an intricate system of feedback loops which regulate just what the next step will be. Only functions tend not to be linear. They can be extremely complex, with a redundancy that also allows the cell to vary internally widely, while maintaining itself, overall, in a relatively stable state. Its internal complexity then accounts for its responsiveness and adaptability. It imparts a degree of flexibility, of adaptability to a system within the cell. All of this going on at a molecular level that plays out, with powerful effect, at the organismic level. Continue reading →