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24 June 2007
The
Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring
Richard Preston
Redwood
trees can grow to over 350 feet in height and 30 feet in diameter, but
because they cluster in dense, secluded groves they can be hard to find and
almost as hard to measure. Basically
you have to climb to the top and drop a string down to the ground. Only a handful of people are well
acquainted with these remarkable beings, and they guard closely the secrets
of the trees, including exactly where the biggest ones are. This book is
about these few people and their adventures in the last two decades. Some are
hardworking hobbyists with day jobs, others have followed their visceral
fascination with the redwoods to biology careers spent exploring the
breathtaking and often dangerous treetops. Like the undersea world,
there’s more up there than most people thought—an ecosystem of
ants and plants and salamanders. These trees live their lives on a scale hard
for humans to comprehend: their size makes them seem to be unchanging, but to
add even a quarter inch a year requires rapid growth. The very tallest may be
older than the Parthenon. This book is more about the people who love the
trees than the trees themselves, which suited me fine, since I think science
goes down best with a heaping helping of story—a love story,
ideally—and there’s one in here.
Preston is a skilled writer who makes
the most of a collection of appealingly odd characters and a breathtaking
setting. I wish he’d been able
to resist writing himself into the narrative, but that’s a small
quibble with an otherwise terrific book.
Unhooked:
How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay
Love and Lose at Both
Laura Sessions Stepp
Stepp takes
college-age women to task for having sex too easily and perpetuating hookup
culture, but never addresses the age-old double standard. I’d like to
see a companion book about young men, titled "Off the Hook." Women
want sex at least as much as men do (even if that's because they read more
into it than is probably there). Men who want more than casual sex (and most
young men, even the college students enjoying the candy store, say they want
to get married and concede that hooking up won’t get them there) still
leave it up to women to keep things in check.
Stepp’s addition to the chorus of
voices blaming young women for the bad faith of men is unhelpful at best.
On
Chesil
Beach
Ian McEwan
Amsterdam bored me quickly, and Atonement seemed obvious, but this small, pretty novel won me
right over. A pair of 22-year-old
English newlyweds in 1962, painfully unskilled at sex and even worse at
talking about it, runs their relationship aground on their disastrous wedding
night. It’s shocking how easily things can go sour, and almost as
shocking that we can so easily shrug and move on. Maybe if they had been born
ten years later the sexual revolution would have helped them solve their
problems. Maybe if they’d been
older, wiser, and more patient they would have been able to solve those
problems on their own. But maybe if they’d been anything but young and
innocent their relationship would never have been so sweet (see above).
Why
I Turned Right: Leading Baby Boom
Conservatives Chronicle Their Political Journeys
Edited by Mary Eberstadt
I was
expecting to hear how moments of insight led to well-reasoned positions on
matters like fair trade, rent control, affirmative action, and
immigration—all issues on which a conservative position is a sound one.
Instead, this is a collection of variations on the themes of “I don't
have to conserve energy if I don't want to” and “Anti-war
protesters are ugly and don’t bathe.” The typical contributor decided when he was
12 that Jimmy Carter was wimpy and Ronald Reagan was cool, and he
hasn’t bothered to reexamine his opinion since. Surely there are
conservatives out there who can understand that disagreeing with those who
pilloried the young man who called a group of women “water
buffalo” (evidently an epithet resulting from a clumsy translation
rather than from racism) doesn’t require becoming a right-winger. But
this book portrays the conservative choice less as a matter of thought than
of wanting to be in the cool crowd. If
the contributors are seeking to quash debate they’ve certainly
succeeded in that, since there’s no way to argue with irrationalism,
sloppy thinking, and bad faith. But if they’re seeking to convert
others to their cause, I don’t see how smugness and insults will be
effective.
Whispering in the Giant's Ear: A
Frontline Chronicle from Bolivia's
War on Globalization
William Powers
The
author of Blue Clay People—a
personal story of development work in Liberia—was re-posted to Bolivia
and wrote this equally engaging and thought-provoking book about the
indigenous people of the rainforest, multinational energy companies forced to
change their ravaging ways, and their sometimes competing interests in the
lungs of our planet. Again Powers
mixes politics, history, personal stories of people he meets, and his own
reactions and conflicts. He is not in Bolivia to impose his own idea of
progress on the locals—he's well aware that wealthy Westerners aren't
necessarily healthier or happier than those who live hand to mouth. But he doesn't idealize the poor or
indigenous people either—he's frustrated at their nepotism, corruption,
and prejudices as much as he is at those of the people who try to take
advantage of them. He's particularly
good at deflating assumptions, like the idea that green development is a
luxury that the poor cannot afford, and untangling the complex layers of
social interaction, such as when some indigenous men offer him coca leaves
and he knows that if he declines he'll be one kind of insulting cliché but if
he accepts he'll be another, equally insulting one. At the end of the book, after six years of
hard work abroad, Powers is missing the United States and feeling ready
to start a family. I hope that doesn't
mean settling down—it seems to me he has a couple of continents left to
visit, and a few more books to write.
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