EP#14: 2023 Best Science & Nature Writing–Overview

* The Best American Science and Nature Writing of 2023 (ed. Carl Zimmer)

February – March 2024

CT and I selected this book to continue our essay project. However, after reading the first three pieces, we have reconsidered. Although the articles are interesting, they are not what either of would call essays. It’s really journalism, with the focus on ideas. The prose is generally clear and workman like, but as yet we have not encountered any writing that makes us pause to savor the phrase. We intend to look through the book, and — by paying attention to where the piece was originally published – see if we can come up with more essay-like pieces. However, we both suspect, that the book will not past muster vis a vis our project, and that we will move on to something else following our next meeting.

LS: Land Above the Trees: A Guide to American Alpine Tundra, Ann Zwinger & Beatrice E. Willard

February 2024…

This book was recommended in Kim Stanley Robinson’s The High Sierra: A Love Story, as a good guide to the ecology and botany of the Sierra Nevada (and the upper portions of other North American ranges). And, indeed, it is beautifully written with a narrative style in which the reader moves through landscapes with the authors, looking at this and that, in contrast to what I had expected would be more of a catalog or encyclopedic approach. The book is divided into two principle parts: part 1 examines elements of ‘above the trees’ ecosystems, like fellfields or krumholtz; part 2 looks at particular North American tundra ecosystems, with one chapter being on the Sierra Nevada.

BG: Medici Money: Banking, Metaphysics, and Art in Fifteenth Century Florence, Tim Parks

February 2024

Book Group: Medici Money: Banking, Metaphysics, and Art in Fifteenth Century Florence, Tim Parks, 2005.

My initial impression, after one chapter, is that it will be a pretty straightforward read – it is not clear to me if it will be anything other than a slightly-dramatized history of the Medici’s. Parks is not a historian, cites no references, and has a 4-page “Bibliographic Note” which makes it clear that he doesn’t think much of academics. All this does not make me optimistic.

Final impression: My initial impression was accurate, but I did learn some very general things.

Most interesting was to understand how chaotic the Italian City States were at the time.
- There were continual wars conducted by mercenary armies; citizens were taxed to support the wars, and some smaller towns were sometimes looted or ravished, but mostly the wars didn’t involve civilians
- Many governments were nominally ‘elite republics’ that were governed by councils of members of powerful families, but in practice it appears that one family would typically be in power, and would uses a combination of nepotism and favoritism to stay in power.
- Italy consisted of five power centers that were continually shifting alliances: Naples in the south, Rome farther north, and then Milan, Florence and Venice. When one would become dominant, a couple others would enter an alliance against ti.
Also of interest was the way banks worked
- While banks loaned money and effectively collected interest, that counted as usury and so they used various facades to avoid the appearance of usury
- Banks also needed to participate in trading to create means of getting repayment for their investments
- Bankers also, apparently because they were really concerned about their souls, cultivated close relationships with the catholic church to achieve absolution.
As time went on
- the Church became more and more corrupt, and became of less use as a way of allowing bankers to ‘purify’ themselves by association
  - bankers, in an effort to cultivate a high social status, made more and more loans to princes and others who could not be counted on to repay them in anything but social capital.
  - the generations of Medici morphed from
    (1) just bankers who kept a low social profile (e.g., Giovani),
    (2) bankers and behind-the-scenes political operators (e.g.,Cosimo);
    (3) primarily politicians and elite patrons with little compentence in banking (e.g., Lorenzo)

w/CS: Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal, Mary Roach

January-February 2024

Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal, Mary Roach, 2022. I am reading the with CS. Mary Roach is a popular science writer who has developed a ‘brand’ of doing popular science books with toungue-in-cheek titles like Gulp, Stiff, Bonk, and so forth.

My impression after the first two chapters is that it will be a fun, fairly light read. She is very good at tossing in the amusing descriptive phrase.

EP #`13: Awakenings, Oliver Sacks

January 2024

Entry 13 in the Essays Project with CT; this is the seventh book we’ve read by Oliver Sacks. This is the book that, with the help of a documentary and then movie, transformed him into something of a celebrity. It is an account of the experience of ‘awakening’ patients with Parkinson’s induced by Encephalitis Lethargia by administering L-Dopa, their experiences of returning to a sort of normal life, and then their declines due to the follow-on negative effects of L-Dopa.

LS* – Finding the Forest, Peter Bundy

December 2023

* This is part of a small project of reading essays that focus on landscape and natural history, the idea being to familiarize myself with this genre, and to develop a better sense of what I like and do not like.

This is a short book about the author’s journey into forestry. I’m ambivalent about it. The first part of the book focuses on his own story, which I don’t find particularly interesting or inspiring. I also have to say that the writing is a bit precious – he is fond of invoking Mother Nature, and personifying the forest; he also tries to be lyrical in what seems to me a clumsy and prosaic way. However, once he becomes established in his career as a forester, I find the book more worthwhile: it is a good survey of the today’s thinking in forestry, about both its past shortcomings and its current approaches. But the combination of preachiness, romanticism and clumsy attempts at lyricism will keep me from recommending it to others.

LS*–The High Sierra: A Love Story, Kim Stanley Robinson

November 2023

The High Sierra: A Love Story, by Kim Stanely Robinson. 2022.

* I was reading this for other reasons, but nevertheless it fits well into my project to read essays that focus on landscape and natural history.

TL;DR: I love this book. But it is not for everyone. On the other hand, it is organized in such a way that readers interested in particular topics — geology, history, etc. – could skip through the book attending to one or a few themes that interest them. It has great pictures, too.

I’m a big fan of KSR, and think it likely that I’ve read everything he’s written, although it is possible that that omits a few early science fiction novels that were retroactively published after he became better known. I like the complex characters he develops, the intensely developed worlds he portrays, and especially his attention to geology, climate, economics, politics, and the role of large institutions – themes that are uncommon in much science fiction. Also unusual is that he sometimes ventures beyond the borders of SF, as with his novel Years of Rice and Salt, and especially with this book, which is multi-threaded work the interweaves memoir, geology, natural history and history.

LS* – A Walk in the Woods, Bill Bryson

November 2023

* This is part of a small project of reading essays that focus on landscape and natural history, the idea being to familiarize myself with this genre, and develop a better sense of what I like and do not like.

While, overall, it was an enjoyable read that managed to keep my interest, I was not that keen on it. It is an example of what I am expecting is a subgenre of writing where the author sets out on an ‘adventure’ with little or no preparation (and often with an even less prepared companion), and then recounts his misadventures. Amusing, but to someone who believes research and preparation, a bit difficult to engage with.

Bryson is, in fact, a good writer, and when he actually turned his eye on the environment around him managed to craft some nice phrases. The phrases I tended to like often fell into a few rhetorical categories.

w/CS: Elixir: A History of Water and Humankind*, Brian Fagan

November 2023…

*Elixir: A History of Water and Humankind, Brian Fagan. Reading with CJS.

Comment after finishing seven chapters:
There is interesting material here, and I am happy to be reading it. However, the writing is not grea: it is difficult to follow if you are really trying to get a deep sense of what is going on.

The same date is sometimes referred to as 4,000 BCE, 6,000 years ago, or a millennia after another event. I can do the math, but pausing to do so drops me out of the flow of the text.
The maps helpfully included in the chapters lack many of the places referred to in the text: Where are the Taurus mountains? Are they the same as the mountains near Cudi Dag (not shown on the map either). Clearly, neither writer nor editors ever tried referring to the associated map…
Places are also referred to with different names: The Lands of Enlil; Southern Mesopotamia; the lands to the south of modern-day Bagdad; the Fertile Crescent refer, I think, to the same area. But it is difficult to be sure.
Often it is unclear what the relationship between sequential examples are — are they supposed to reinforce one another, or complement one another, or are they being presented for some other reason? Sign-posting would be really helpful.

Preface

The three themes of this book are (1) gravity and its fundamental impact on the flow of water; (2) the relationship between ritual and water management; and (3) sustainability. One point the book will take up is the way in which the invention of the mechanical pump transformed the mining and movement of water.

The book takes an anthropological perspective, closely examining the relationships between water technologies and human usage and management practices, and looking at the role rituals play. It looks at both historical examples — even reaching into the deep past where the primary source of information is archeological work — and present day examples. And of course the book addresses the ongoing crisis in water sourcing and distribution, and the question of sustainability.

EP#12: The Mind’s Eye, Oliver Sacks

November-December 2023

Entry 12 in the Essays Project with CT; and this is the sixth book we’ve read by Oliver Sacks. Here we take up the neurological case account essays for which he is best known, after reading his two autobiographies, and other writings ranging from general essays to an account of his travels in Oaxaca. This book, published in 2010, explores cases in which people have lost visual abilities that we all take for granted – not so much blindness (although maybe there will be some essays on that), but rather the consequences of some of the many ways in which the complex and intertwined elements of the visual processing system may be disrupted.

EP #11: Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood*, Oliver Sacks, 2001

Entry 11 in the Essays Project with CT; the ‘summer of Sacks’ has turned into the fall of Sacks. It is interesting to be getting such a comprehensive view of a single person’s life and writing. Uncle Tungsten was apparently written in response to the spontaneous surfacing of childhood memories as Sacks approached his 60th year. We’ve read some other essays from that time, mostly from Everything in its Place (essays on South Kensington and Humphry Davies), and found those very good though we hope considerable new ground will be covered. [Later: New ground is being covered — there is not a lot of repetition…]

* Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood, Oliver Sacks, 2001.

EP #10*: The River of Consciousness, Oliver Sacks

*The River of Consciousness, Oliver Sacks, 2015.

This is part of the course of essay reading I am doing with CT; in particular, this is part of what we have dubbed ‘The Summer of Sacks.’ According to the introduction, this book was posthumously assembled at Sack’s direction a couple of weeks before his death. One of the catalysts was a televised panel with other notable scientists and scholars — Gould, Dyson, Dennet, etc. — that was later captured in a book called “A Glorious Accident.” This book contains a wide range of essays on scientific topics, with, I suspect, particular attention to history.

w/CS: Islands of Abandonment: Nature Rebounding in the Post-human Landscape, by Cal Flyn

September 2023

Islands of Abandonment: Nature Rebounding in the Post-human Landscape, by Cal Flynn, 2021.* This book looks at how nature — fungi, plants, animals – are re-colonize landscapes that have been destroyed and abandoned by humans. Examples include massive slag piles, nuclear test grounds, etc. It examines both how primary succession occurs in unpromising circumstances, and how the absence of human presence facilitates re-wilding. In the introduction, the author notes that we are now in the midst of a vast self-directed experiment in re-wilding, driven in part by the concentration of people in cities (and a soon-to-be-decreasing population), and in part by the depletion of non-sustainable natural resources that leave ‘waste lands’ behind.

Post-reading comment: There are three or four chapters in the book that are great, and really align with the aims laid out above. Unfortunately, more of the chapters, particularly as one progresses in the book, are more in the line of what I would call disaster tourism: lyrical descriptions of degraded environments and terrible situations, with little or no mention of how the ecosystem has adapted or not.

* Reading with CJS, fall of 2023

EP #9*: On the Move: A Life, Oliver Sacks

*On the Move, Oliver Sacks, 2015.

These are my notes on On the Move, Oliver Sacks autobiography (billed as volume 2, but the publisher, volume 1 being Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood, written a couple of decades earlier). This is part of the course of essay reading I am doing with CT; in particular, this is part of what we have dubbed ‘The Summer of Sacks.’ These are not, of course, essays, but we have become interested in Sacks, and it is interesting to see the essays against a fuller narrative of his life.

w/CS: Assembling California*, John McPhee

July 2023

* Reading with CJS. Page numbers cited are from Annals of the Former World, a collection of his work of which Assembling California is only one part. The parts of the AC, as described below, are not well-separated in the text; they only appear in the table of contents.

w/RB: An Immense World: : How Animal Senses Reveal the World Around Us, Ed Yong

An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the World Around Us, Ed Yong, 2022.

Overall, a good book. Yong writes well, and sometimes has very nice turns of phrase, though I’d say his gift is more for clarity and content than lyricism. The downsides of the book — small ones but nevertheless there — is that he often doesn’t go as deeply into the mechanisms and neurophysiology of sensing as I would like. It is also the case that one gets a bit of whiplash from looking first at this organism, and then at that, and then at that — but I don’t see how that could have been avoided in this sort of book.

To summarize briefly and incompletely, here are some of the points I found most interesting:

What we think of as a single sense (e.g., vision) can be quite complex. All of the following can be separate: distinguishing light from dark areas; color vision (and bi- tri- and tetra-achromatism); ability to see polarized and/or UC and/or infrared light; and more.
Also, the same sense can be configured and deployed in different ways: the shape of an organism’s visual field is tightly bound with its role in the food web; an organism may have one, two or multiple eyes, and may be able to move them independently; and so on.
Some senses seem easy to evolve, in that they have been independently evolved at many different points in time. And then lost, and then re-evolved.

April 2023 – February 2024

Introduction

The book begins with a fanciful description of a room with different creatures in it, including a human, a robin, an elephant, a spider, and so on. It uses this to make the point that the different creatures, although all in the same room, have radically different impressions of the room and its occupants. What is evident to one is invisible to another. An organism’s very particular view of its environment – is referred to as its umveldt, coined by Jacob Uexkull in 1909.

EP #8*: Oaxaca Journal, Oliver Sacks

Oaxaca Journal, Oliver Sacks, 2019.

These are my notes on Oaxaca Journal, by Oliver Sacks, 2019. This is part 8 of the course of essay reading I am doing with CT; in particular, this is part of what we have dubbed ‘The Summer of Sacks.’ Strictly speaking, these are not essays but rather chapters — or daily entries – from a journal he kept of a trip to Oaxaca, Mexico, with the American Fern Society.

Introduction

Sacks opens by writing of his love of the Natural History journals of the nineteenth century, and their blend of the personal and professional. He notes that most of the naturalists were essentially amateurs, self-taught, and feeling their way before or as biology and botany were crystalizing into sciences. He adds:

This sweet, unspoiled, preprofessional atmosphere, ruled by a sense of adventure and wonder rather than by egotism and a lust for priority and fame, still survives here and there, it seems to me, in certain natural history societies, and amateur societies of astronomers and archaeologists, whose quiet yet essential existences are virtually unknown to the public. It was the sense of such an atmosphere that drew me to the American Fern Society in the first place, that incited me to go with them on their fern-tour to Oaxaca early in 2000.
Oliver Sacks, Oaxaca Journal, p xiv

EP #7* – Everything in Its Place, Oliver Sacks

April – June, 2023

Everything in its Place: First Loves and Last Tales, Oliver Sacks, 2019.

Favorites
Waterbabies, 1997
Remembering South Kensington, 1993
Travels with Lowell, 1988
The Lost Virtues of the Asylum, 2009
Botanists on Park, 2009
Orangutan

EP #5*: Favorites from the Golden Age of the Am. Essay** 1945-1970

2023

Favorites:
An Evening with Jackie Kennedy, Norman Mailer
Writing about Jews, Philip Roth
The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Richard Hofstadter
The Twenty-ninth Republican Convention, Gore Vidal
One Night’s Dying, Loren Eisley