Showing posts with label nature. Show all posts
Showing posts with label nature. Show all posts

Tuesday, March 3, 2020

Waking Up in Eden by Lucinda Fleeson


Rating: WORTHY!

This was a biographical print book that I picked up because it sounded interesting and in the end, by and large, it really was quite engaging. In that respect it did go downhill a little toward the end, but in Hawaii, it's all downhill right? I mean they are volcanic islands after all! There was a bit more personal stuff in here than I cared for, and I certainly didn't need to know about the author's fling with a surfer dude, but aside from that thankfully very brief inter-lewd, the monologue about Hawaii, its history, traditions, exploration, and its flora and fauna were really quiet charming and well-written.

The author was a journalist, but decided to give up that life and move to Hawaii to take on the job of a fund-raiser for a botanical garden which aimed to preserve something of old Hawaii, and to exhibit it for the public. She spent many years there becoming pleasantly habituated to the life (after some initial hiccups), and stayed in the job until her immediate boss died from a heart-attack and her new boss seemed, she writes, more intent upon slashing budgets than pursuing his predecessor's goals.

Frankly I felt the author could have done more in terms of detailing Hawaii's wildlife, plants and animals and how they interlock. She does go into some detail about how tragical has been the human occupation of the islands, and how it has resulted in a massive extinction because of human predation and human-introduced invasive species, such as rats for example, along with feral cows, mongooses (yes, you heard that right), pigs and feral cats and dogs. Hawaii is the shameful world-leader in modern extinctions of plant species for example, where an estimated two plant species go extinct every year which is five hundred times faster than any purely natural rate. This is why some conservationists call Hawaii 'the extinction capital of the world'.

The mongoose was a seriously misguided error. It was introduced because the capitalistic sugar cane producers wanted the rats controlled, but the damage mongooses have done has more than outweighed the few rats they ate, since they prey on whatever takes their fancy and this includes Hawaiian species that have suffered far more greatly than rats ever will. This is what happens when people who are clueless about science are put in charge. Of pretty much anything.

It would have been nice to have more of that kind of overview in place of the unprotected sex on a first date chapter that we got, but that opportunity has gone now. That said though, I did enjoy this book for the most part and consider it a worthy read.


Sunday, July 14, 2019

The Rocking Book of Rocks by Florence Bullough, Amy Ball, Anna Alanko


Rating: WORTHY!

This is from an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

Bullough and Ball have proven themselves to be a formidable writing team in this stunningly-illustrated (by Alanko) book on geology, with a great title aimed at young readers. It's in glorious color and skips nothing in its story of how the superficially mundane, but underneath fascinating, rocks that we live on and around, came to be.

It's a hugely long story in the making, going back well over four billion years, but the authors have shrunk it down to easily digestible chunks, starting with what are rocks and minerals, and going through the formation of the Earth and a geological timeline (here there be dragons - aka dinosaurs!). There's an overview of the main three types of rock, and the book then goes into a bit more detail about igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic rock, how they're formed, and the interesting sub-types of rock formations that can be found within each, including fossils and precious stones.

The book not only talks about the rocks, crystals, and gems, but about how they came to be, and where they're found, and each double-page spread (there are about fifty of them - 100 or so pages in all) has gorgeous, detailed artwork. I learned things myself from this book that I hadn't known, and this is after I'd already put out my own modest book about crystals in my "The Little Rattuses" series, so it's not just the young 'uns who can learn from this. I enjoyed it and commend it fully as a fun, interesting, and educational book, and a tour de force of illustration.


Wednesday, July 3, 2019

Bird's Eye View The Natural World by John Farndon, Paul Boston


Rating: WORTHY!

This is from an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

Erratum:
"Pampas deer grass" should be ‘pampas deer graze' I suspect on the South American page.

This colorful and educational book is quite literally what it says: a bird's eye view of various places of beauty and fascination in the world, starting in the Florida Everglades and going down over South America, out to a Pacific atoll, then across the Pacific to Uluru Rock in central Australia, up over the Guilin Hills in China, across the Asian Steppes, down over the Himalayas, through East Africa, across to Wales, on to Northern Scandinavia, back to the Irish coast, and then to France.

At each stop we learn about the animals and plants that live there, and a little about the ecology and how the land got to be that way at that location. It was unusual, fun, and very interesting, and hopefully it will lure readers into learning more. I don't think anyone who has read this book or anything like it can fail to see what horrible things we're doing to our planet and how urgent it is that we stop doing those things and rectify the evil we've already perpetrated. I commend this fully as a very worthy read.


Friday, March 8, 2019

The Looking Book by PK Hallinan


Rating: WORTHY!

I loved this book. It's a great idea especially if, like the somewhat beleaguered, but upbeat woman in the story, you have kids who are glued to the video screen whenever they get a chance. It encourages them to get to the other side of the screen - the screen door that is! - and enjoy the great outdoors.

Mom hands the kids a pair of eyeglasses each, but there are no lenses in them! She advises the kids to put them on, and to go outside to see what they can see through these special 'glasses'. It turns out that the kids notice more wearing them than they're used to seeing - especially on the highly restricted and biased canvas of a video screen! It also turns out that they learn they can see just as much even without the glasses, so their whole world opens up. I think the story is a great and inventive idea to encourage kids to pay attention to the world around them and get away from the idiot box for a while. I commend it.


Saturday, December 29, 2018

We Build Our Homes by Laura Knowles, Chris Madden


Rating: WORTHY!

This is from an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

This was a fun and educational story about animals that build. Be it homes or a means to attract a mate, they do a workmanlike and wonderful job, and they live all over the world.

In a series of colorful and beautifully-done illustrations by Chris Madden, and with some rather poetic prose from Laura Knowles, the story is told from the animal's perspective and describes (from the blurb): "mammals, birds, and insects [which] can be found building incredible things. From biggest beaver dams to tinniest caddisfly cases...." There are the exotic, such as ovenbirds, which build adobe huts on tree branches, and the amazing Darwin's bark spiders, which build gigantic webs, to the more mundane, such as moles, to the highly endangered by human stupidity and lethargy: polar bears, who can build a toasty home out of icy snow in bitterly cold weather, and then starve themselves for five months while their cubs almost literally suck them dry!

The book doesn't focus solely on fluffy mammals like too many children's books do, but covers some insects, reptiles, as well as birds, and features some more grown-up details in the back for interested adults - and every adult should be interested in what we're doing to our home even as these animals struggle to continue to build their own. Every kid needs to be raised with a deep appreciation for nature and for the damage humans can do when we think only of ourselves and not of our home - Planet Earth, Anything which can bring kids a keener awareness of nature, and how it works, and how delicate some of it is, is to be welcomed, and I commend this for being an important part of that education.


Saturday, February 24, 2018

Great Polar Bear by Carolyn Lesser


Rating: WORTHY!

This is from an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

This was a beautifully-rendered (using elegantly torn paper) and charmingly-written novel for young children about the hard life of a polar bear. If I had a criticism I would say it was that climate change, while referenced in a note at the end of the book (which can be used as a talking-point with your child of course), wasn't really factored into the story. I felt it should have been because despite the liars who nay-say it, climate change is real, it's affecting people's lives now as well as the very existence of hundreds of species of plant and animal. It's already affecting Polar bears.

That said, this story tells, in gorgeously-written prose and pulling no punches, of the tough existence of this bear in the frozen north, sleeping in wind-sheltering snowdrifts for warmth, and hunting seals. It describes some of the means by which Polar bears stay warm, including the hollow hairs on their pelt. I think it might have gone more into the fact that it's getting harder for bears to find sufficient food as climate changes, but it does tell a stirring story and if it gets childrens' interest warmed to this icy, precarious life, then it will have served Polar bears well.

In the USA, as I write this, there is a movement - finally - to protect our schools from deranged people with automatic weapons. This is long overdue and shames our politicians that they love the NRA more than they do the lives of young children, but as many lives as are sacrificed to political self-interest and inertia, those lives, awfully tragic and irreplaceable as they are, are a tiny portion of what will be lost if climate change is not addressed. It is the most critical crisis facing humanity today, but selfish business interests are literally buying-off right-wing politicians and these callous, cynical low-lifes are sacrificing our children's future for short-term personal profit. They are also sacrificing nature, Polar bears along with it.

I would like to have seen climate changed addressed more directly here because Polar bears are utterly dependent on the ice-floes which are fast disappearing. While these magnificent animals are technically not considered endangered, they are rated as vulnerable and as the North Pole warms (it's thought that it will be ice-free by mid-century at the present rate of warming), their territory shrinks. If the North Pole melts, since it is already floating on the ocean, it will contribute little to sea-rise, but it will rob Polar bears of a major hunting ground. Because the Greenland ice sheet is all on land, if it melts, it will raise sea levels by over twenty feet. Coasts will be inundated and Polar bears will be left with nowhere to go.

If this book does anything to educate people, especially youngsters, about this crisis, then it will have served us well. I liked the book, loved the prose, found the images quite entrancing, and I highly recommend it.


Tuesday, April 25, 2017

How to Read Nature: An Expert's Guide to Discovering the Outdoors You've Never Noticed by Tristan Gooley


Rating: WARTY!

Note that this is based on an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

This book was written by a guy who seems quite dedicated to the outdoors and this book is supposed to communicate his love to the rest of us, but I had a hard time with it.

The author is very widely-traveled, I understand, and he seems to know what he's talking about, but for me this book failed to connect or to inspire, and I think it was because he didn’t approach it the right away. It felt to me like a slapdash approach, with scattered thoughts being tossed in almost at random, like the author was merely dabbling here and there without really coming to grips with things. I think he could have done a better job at bringing newbies into his world. He has other books out there along similar lines, and I found myself wondering if this might be a shorter distillation of one of the earlier works.

I kept asking myself who is this book aimed at? To whom is it supposed to appeal? The obvious answer is 'anyone who is interested in nature', which is why it interested me, but the problem is that it’s too invested in 'wild nature' - being out in the countryside - for it to be relevant to city dwellers. Now it’s true that many city dwellers do like to get out into nature, but it’s not so common for those people to be able to devote the time and frequency to getting out into the countryside that it would require for this book to be of any real and enduring value. I kept thinking that a 'Nature for City Dwellers' book might have been of more utility in this case.

For those who reside in, or spend a lot of time in the country, a lot of what's in here will be preaching to the choir, since they already know many of these things. I acknowledge that there's nearly always something to be learned, but it felt like it would be of limited value to them, too.

Is there a segment of the population in between those two extremes which might benefit? I'm sure there is, but how large it is, is an open question. Additionally, the book is very British in its own nature. It’s not that it doesn’t mention other countries and other cultures, and other wildlife, but it’s essentially British at its core, which may limit its appeal.

There is a group of people like me, who are not blind to nature and always willing to learn more. I live on the edge of a city and take care of my own yard, so there is a connection I have that perhaps too many others do not. I don't notice the detailed things he does, because I don't have that kind of time to spend on this, but I do notice things both in the yard, and at times when I do get a chance to be out in the semi-wilds, and to me they're interesting.

On hikes and rambles in the past, I've pointed things out to my kids, but their interest in those things waned as they grew to have other focuses. Maybe that's a failing of mine, but I remain unconvinced that this book, which tries to do the same thing, is a going to draw in very many people who do not already lead, or seek to lead or in some way emulate the same kind of outdoors life to which the author has access. Most people do not have that option very readily available to them.

Yes, these things are interesting, but they’re not critical to most people's everyday life and a lot of the things he talks about are irrelevant or unattainable to most city dwellers. So this begs the question as to why a better connection was not made to the advantages this knowledge would bring, or to the utility it would have or your average person about town (and I mean that quite literally).

A connection with nature is always better - better for the planet if nothing else. If people are made more aware of how critical Earth's health is to us and how delicate aspects of it are, through people being led to feel closer ties to nature, Earth is likely to be better protected, but there are other virtues, mind-expanding ones which, while touched upon here from time to time, felt somewhat glossed over. Which brings me to the photographs included in the book. They are all monochrome, which really divorces them from nature, in its glorious technicolor, so for me they didn’t add anything. More on this anon.

The biggest problem for me though was the apparent random nature of the book. The chapters I thought ought to have been the lead-in: nature's clocks and calendars, all appeared in the second half of the book. This made no sense to me. Starting with the big picture and carefully moving to an ever detailed smaller one would have been the best approach.

To me it would have made more sense to organize the whole book in that way: following the year, and looking at how nature changes during it, with little detours into the other topics he covers as appropriate; in this way, people could jump into the book at whatever season they're in when they get their hands on it, and follow it all the way from there.

Some parts were slightly misleading. For instance, the tale of the Jarawa people who survived the St Stephen's tsunami in 2004 by moving to higher ground before it came. The book implies that they had - not quite, but almost - a sixth sense to read the clues and take action, but the fact is that their folklore told them if there was an earthquake, there often can be a giant wave on its heels. They were merely following word-of-mouth traditions of their people. It was not some magical connection with nature. They would still have moved even if a tsunami had not come, which would have been a waste of their time on that occasion, but still a smart move in the grand scheme of things wherein it’s better to be safe than sorry. Their survival is to be rejoiced and is worth learning of, but it's not worth making it seem like there was something just short of otherworldly going on.

In contrast, other parts of the book were oddly-lacking important details. For example in one section the author makes some observations about how to determine what kind of rock you're likely to find under a piece of land based on the flora that grows on that land. He says pines like acidic soil and beech trees like alkaline, but he doesn't say how to recognize a beech tree! Without that basic piece of knowledge, you’re prevented from anything else in that cascade. That seems like a sorry omission when it would have been just as easy to put it in there. Would a photograph, even a black and white one, of a beech tree have been appropriate here? I think so - or at least a drawing. Such photographs would have made a difference and not at all appeared all-but randomly chosen.

Obviously in these days of Internet searches, you can not only discover what a beech tree looks like, but also feed in a picture of an unknown tree and likely get a result telling you what tree it is, but if you only have the print book to hand, you’re rather stuck! This is part of what I meant when I said this book had a slap-dash feel to it, like a hastily-packed suitcase might be opened at your beach-front hotel to reveal no swim-suit or no sun tan oil! At least most-everyone knows what a beach looks like!

On a more serious note, I do agree that taking a greater interest in nature not only adds to our joy of life, but also helps us become aware of the more important things: that pollution and climate change are real and dangerous. I'm sorry there was essentially nothing about those critical topics in this book. It's a sad omission which brings me to an observation of my own. This book was formatted with very wide margins and a huge amount of white space, and with lines that were not single-spaced. It’s only a hundred-sixty pages but it could have been much shorter, probably a hundred pages or so.

This matters less in the e-version, except in that it still requires energy to transmit all those blank spaces across the Internet. In the print version, however, should this book go to a large print run, it’s an awful waste of trees. I would have thought that someone who boasts a close-connection with nature would have appreciated that and sought to ameliorate it, so this was another disappointment for me.

As was the search engine! At one point I was looking back to the beech tree and alkaline reference to verify I had not misunderstood. When I searched for 'beech', the app (Bluefire Reader) found it with no problem, but a search for 'acidic' crashed the book and brought me back to the screen which contained the list of books in my Bluefire library (which in this case was only this one book). That's not a problem with the writing or book layout, but it is a problem if people want to look up something and the search engine isn’t stable. Again this was an advance review copy, so maybe this problem, whatever it is, will be fixed in the published version. Maybe the problem is with Bluefire reader. I can't say. I can say it was annoying.

There's a practical issue to the book formatting, from a purely reading PoV, which is that the text was very small on the screen of my phone, which is more likely what you'd be carrying on a nature ramble, rather than the book or a large tablet computer. It’s possible to enlarge text on the screen, but then the page will not swipe to the next one (and sometimes it jumps back to the previous one while you're enlarging it, which is another annoyance!).

For each page, you have to enlarge the text to read comfortably, then you must reduce it to its original size in order to swipe to the next page, and finally, you must then enlarge that page to read it. It made for an irritating read. This is a problem with distributing books in PDF format. It’s not e-reader friendly unless you have a large screen. As I mentioned, though, this was an advance review copy, so maybe the actual published version will be in a more e-friendly format.

So in short, while I do believe books like this are of value and it’s important that people read them, I think this one could have done a much better job than it did and as such, I cannot recommend it as a worthy read.


Thursday, April 30, 2015

Marsh Mud and Mummichogs by Evelyn B Sherr


Title: Marsh Mud and Mummichogs
Author: Evelyn B Sherr
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Rating: WORTHY!

Evelyn Sherr has a BS in Biology and a PhD in Zoology. She's Professor Emeritus in the Oregon State University's Ocean Ecology and Biogeochemistry department. Judged from her writing in this book, she also has a sly sense of humor and her knowledge of salt marsh life is quite 'littorally' amazing. There is one thing on which I have her beat, though: I know that snakes are venomous, not poisonous! Although I guess some snakes might be poisonous if not cooked properly before eating...!

The book is pretty dense and strong on science, but it's not dry and unreadable. Obviously it isn't for everyone, but it is for anyone who has an interest in wildlife, especially if you live in Georgia, or plan on visiting and don't want to end up bitten or stung (or even eaten) by something nasty when all you wanted to do was enjoy the coastline.

So I know what you're wondering: what the heck is a mummichog? Well I didn't know either, and I'm not going to tell you because I have to admit the obscurity of the title was part of the attraction, as I'm sure the author planned. All I'm going to say is that it has nothing to do with killer fish.

The book is well organized and supported with a host of really nice quality gray-scale photographs. I found myself wishing for more, even so. So many animals and plants are mentioned that it would have been nice to see a few more of them. There were too many to show images of them all, but fortunately, if you're reading this on something like an iPad, you can have your browser open, and do an image search to keep up. I was doing this almost spastically. It's one of the major advantages that ebooks have over print books.

And this author really does cover everything. Here's a list of the chapter headers so you can gauge how thorough she is for yourself:

  1. Marine habitats of the Georgia Coast
  2. What You Don't See: Microscopic Life
  3. Marsh Grass, Live Oaks, Sea Oats
  4. Creatures of the Black Goo
  5. Mud Dwellers of Marshes and Creeks
  6. Creepy Crawlies: Insects and Spiders
  7. Marsh Life: Scales
  8. Marsh Life: Feathers and Fur
  9. What Lies Beneath; Zooplankton
  10. Attachment to Place: Settlers
  11. Sound Swimmers: Nekton
  12. On, and Under, the Beach: Living in the Sand
  13. Loggerheads
  14. Shore Birds
  15. seasons in the Sun
  16. The Once and Future Coast

There is also: three appendices, a bibliography, and an index. And there's a preface which I didn't read. I never read forewords, introductions, prefaces, prologues and whatever. Just a personal quirk.

I love the chapter titles that played on movie titles such as 'Creatures of the Black Goo', and 'What Lies Beneath', and the play on words in 'Sound Swimmers'. In the 'Feathers and Fur' chapter I learned of the rice rat - something I had never heard of before. That sounds so cute - and looks just as cute. Any budding animator needs to Disney-fy that before Disney does!

The chapters, as the list above indicates, covered everything from microscopic life to the megafauna of the area, which includes whales and squid. It covered pretty much every class of life there is, from invertebrates to vertebrates, and pretty much every group those two orders include, and it did not shy away from plant life either, which was really nice.

I don't normally pay attention to covers because the author typically has little or nothing to do with them unless they self publish, but in this case, and regardless of who chose the cover, I have to say it was part of the attraction for me. It reminded me of the time I visited a salt marsh (in Texas, not in Georgia, and I walked with my dogs along a raised boardwalk just like this one, hoping the gators wouldn't launch themselves up onto it and try to take one of the dogs! I have to say that Texas gators are pretty decent folk. I saw them in the marsh, their eyes just above the water, but they didn't try anything funny, which just goes to show why you never see a gator doing stand-up comedy. It was a bit scary, but great fun and quite bracing.

So before I wax lyrical with an ocean of comments, let me beach this review by simply saying that I loved this book, loved the way it was written, the sweet sense of humor and the extensive detail of everything to be found in nature on the Georgia coast. I recommend this.