the best of scientific nonfiction

Posted on January 30, 2014 by pagesofjulia

In yesterday’s post, Pops shared with me a list of good fiction-about-science, as presented by author Kirk Smith. As part of that same conversation, Pops asked for my favorite scientific fiction – with “good” science being part of the criteria. Well, unsurprisingly, I didn’t have a lot to offer in that regard. I haven’t tended towards scientific fiction much (nor traditional sci fi); my fiction tends to be mysteries, historical fiction, literary fiction, or increasingly, fantasy; there is always a variety, but I’ve been short on science. I did come up with a few. But I did far better in recommending some really great nonfiction that is scientific in nature: both “good” science, and well written, enjoyable, accessible, good reading. He asked for those two lists, so I’m happy to share them here.

Some great fiction about science:

By Lisa Genova: Love Anthony and Left Neglected, but especially Still Alice. Genova has degrees in biopsychology and neuroscience (the latter a PhD from Harvard, ahem), so one expects that her novels about women and families, in which someone in the family (usually the woman) suffers a neurological disorder or disease, are scientifically accurate. I love that they are scientifically detailed and yet extraordinarily enjoyable novels, too.

Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver: you can read my review, and also note that Kirk Smith and I both recommend this one; in a nutshell, Kingsolver teaches science in the most charmingly accessible of packages, the one and only Dr. Ovid Byron. You must read this; or better, you must hear the audio, because the accents are amazing. (Read by the author, a woman of many talents.)

Madeline L’Engle’s series: A Wrinkle In Time, A Wind in the Door, etc. I hesitate here, because the science begins in reality and then moves outside it (see: farandolae), so I’m not sure it qualifies. But kids’ books – about science – with a female protagonist. Good stuff.

Some great nonfiction about science:

My review hasn’t published yet, but it will any day now, and I’ll come back and edit this post: A Garden of Marvels by Ruth Kassinger is an outstanding, fun, and informative look at the history of botany, really from the birth of botany as a science (relatively recent, since we didn’t think plants were all that important as a subject of study for many centuries). It’s extremely accessible and well written, even funny. One of my recent favorites!

On a Farther Shore, William Souder’s recent biography of Rachel Carson, is for me a classic example of science made reader-friendly and socially important. It doesn’t hurt that I find Carson a fascinating & important figure, and admittedly, this is more biography than science; but I think it qualifies for this list, especially considering Pops’s comments yesterday about the representation of women in literature & science (and literature about science).

Einstein, the biography by Walter Isaacson, was mentioned in Kirk Smith’s talk apparently as being “challenging,” and I wouldn’t disagree entirely, but no knowledge of physics is prerequisite – and I didn’t get all the physics Isaacson described, either, but that was no requirement for enjoying Einstein’s story.

Unfortunately, I read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot before I really began blogging. (I made a few posts on it early on: here, here, and here, but none qualify as a review.) So I can only say, looking back, that as with On a Farther Shore, science is made not only comprehensible, but oh so important and relevant for our past, present and future; not to mention the glaring & compelling social commentary. This is a great book (and one I gave away for World Book Night a few years ago).

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard (my review in parts one and two) is fascinating, varied, lyrical, fun, and whimsical. Both poetry and science. And the oddest chunks of science, too. Do check out some here and here.

River in Ruin by Ray A. March is a loving, informed but readable discussion of exactly what the title says.

Also pre-blog, I read My Stroke of Insight by Jill Bolte Taylor, and it made a major impact on me. I had only recently recovered from a brain injury (from a bike wreck and yes I was wearing my helmet), and reading this book by a neuroanatomist about her stroke & recovery helped me understand my own brain better. She’s a scientist, so she has the “good” science, but she’s also a human being with a personal story to tell, and she tells it well.

When we talk about science writing, though, **the grand prize** has to go to Hali Felt for Soundings. How did I rate that book only a 9? In my memory, it should be a 10. Again with the added benefit of handling women in science and the special challenges they face, Felt tells the story of Marie Tharp’s life and scientific breakthroughs with sensitivity, insight, and yes, science.

Bonus: just the other day this review posted at Shelf Awareness (by my friend Katie at Cakes, Tea and Dreams). I haven’t read the book, but I think it sounds delightful: Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn: A Father, a Daughter, the Meaning of Nothing, and the Beginning of Everything, by Amanda Gefter.

That’s all I have today, Pops, but it ought to get you started! I’m pretty sure you’d put McKibben on this list; any others to share? Anybody?

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Teaser Tuesdays: Everything Is Wonderful by Sigrid Rausing

Posted on January 28, 2014 by pagesofjulia

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading.

wonderful

Everything Is Wonderful is a most interesting slim memoir. From a distance of decades, Sigrid Rausing reviews the year she spent on a collective farm in Estonia, shortly after the Soviet Union pulled out of the country (in name, at least).

Rausing’s writing style is austere, quiet, contemplative, and poetic all at once.

I was tired, and often hungry, but even now, twenty years later, I miss those long quiet walks in that melancholy and restful landscape.

I am finding this quite a unique read.

This quotation comes from an uncorrected advance proof and is subject to change.

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Eating Dirt: Deep Forests, Big Timber, and Life with the Tree-Planting Tribe by Charlotte Gill

Posted on January 20, 2014 by pagesofjulia

eating dirtDoubly recommended by the authors of Fire Season and Dirt Work, this one moved to the top of the list.

Eating Dirt is the memoir of a tree planter. Charlotte Gill works seasonally planting trees in the Canadian west. She is employed by a company of tree planters, who contract in turn with big business – mostly logging – to replant sections of clear-cut land, usually. The daily job is to travel out to the plot in question (via beat-up truck, or boat, or by foot), load up one’s bags – a belted & suspendered piece involving two side saddle-bags and one at the rear, at hip height – with seedlings, stomp around on varying surfaces, and use a shovel and one’s hands to repeatedly insert seedlings in soil (clay, gravel, duff). It involves much bending, and the loss of fingernails. They encounter cougars, bears, muck, dirt, rain, bugs, rocks, and unspeakably sore muscles.

Gill has quite a bit in common with Christine Byl of Dirt Work: the dirty, male-dominated outdoor environment, the satisfaction of a job well done in a world populated by trees, twigs, green and brown and wild things. Not to overemphasize these two books’ similarities – because each is unique and lovely on its own and neither is derivative – but they both caused the same combined reaction in me, of yearning jealousy and thankfulness that I don’t do that for a living. What can I say. I love to be outside and wish I spent more days and nights there, but I also fret enough over my bad knees with my office job, and I like taking a shower and feeling clean after being dirty. In fact, the question at the front of my mind as I’ve finished this book is: what did clean mean in those years that make up the majority of human history, in which we didn’t have seemingly endless showers at our command?

Dirtiness aside, Gill writes with humor and wisdom and the kind of occasionally zoomed-out perspective that I like in a nature-based memoir. A little research into the history of earth, trees, and people – and the relationships between them – brings her perspective, that of just one person, into focus within a larger picture. And as a bonus, she’s based in the same general region that my parents recently moved to. We have all been learning about the Pacific Northwest – including the trees of the area – and this book offered some welcome insights to that end.

One of the more surprising subjects of Eating Dirt, for me, was the ambiguous or controversial nature of the work. I read “tree-planting tribe” and expected that it would be all green-ness and good; but as I said in my opening synopsis, Gill’s employers are most often logging companies, banking on the profitability of trees, not their inherent worth as trees themselves.

And we got paid… by the very same business that cut the trees down, which canceled the altruism right out of the equation.

Any good they provide, then, is already offset by those who paid for their planting. It’s not as simple as it seems at first glance, and Gill wastes no time in making that point.

Her voice is gritty, and her perspective not so much unapologetic in general as clear-eyed about its dual nature. She’s funny and clearly likeable – like Byl, someone I’d like to know, although I’d be intimidated by both women’s toughness. I enjoyed what I learned about the world from Gill, but also very much value what she’s encouraged me to think about.

Nature has done its big job. Like a ball thrown up in the air, all has risen, crested, and begun its arc back down into earth. After many years spent outside we come to see this – the parabola – as the contour of life itself. It’s the path the sun takes across the sky. The shape of a story. Ours included. Beginning, middle, and end.

Right up there with some of my favorites of the past few years. Recommended.

Rating: 7 red tree voles.

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Teaser Tuesdays: The Ogallala Road by Julene Bair

Posted on January 14, 2014 by pagesofjulia

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading.

ogallala

I found very thought-provoking Julene Bair’s memoir of returning with mixed feelings to the family farm. My full review will not be out until a little closer to its March publication date, but for now, a few lines that got me thinking:

Our sense of beauty is a survival instinct, telling us that a place can sustain us for generations to come. I’d always known this in my bones, but it wasn’t until many years after I left Kansas and discovered my passion for wilderness that the intuition became conscious. This creek was now ugly. That didn’t bode well for the underlying aquifer’s ability to support life in the future.

Part of me nods firmly at this, and part of me wonders if beauty is really the same thing as lifegiving. Perhaps it’s all in the eye of the beholder? Please weigh in, Pops.

This quotation comes from an uncorrected advance proof and is subject to change.

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book beginnings on Friday: Eating Dirt by Charlotte Gill

Posted on January 10, 2014 by pagesofjulia

Thanks to Rose City Reader for hosting this meme. To participate, share the first line or two of the book you are currently reading and, if you feel so moved, let us know what your first impressions were based on that first line.

eating dirt

This book came recommended from two authors I’ve fallen in love with in recent years: Phil Connors and Christine Byl. That was enough for me. Charlotte Gill begins:

We fall out of bed and into our rags, still crusted with the grime of yesterday. We’re earth stained on our thighs and shoulders, and muddy bands circle our waists, like grunge rings on the sides of a bathtub. Permadirt, we call it. Disposable clothes, too dirty for the laundry.

Hers is a memoir of planting trees, and that’s about all I know so far, but I think I’m going to love it.

Happy Friday and what are you reading this weekend?

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Writing Is My Drink: A Writer’s Story of Finding Her Voice (and a Guide to How You Can Too) by Theo Pauline Nestor

Posted on January 8, 2014 by pagesofjulia

A writer’s journey, written as a guide for aspiring and developing writers.

writingdrink

Theo Pauline Nestor always wanted to be a writer. But she struggled to find confidence and her writing voice for many years, through two kids and several career changes, before publishing How to Sleep Alone in a King-Size Bed, a memoir about her divorce and its aftermath. In Writing Is My Drink, Nestor returns to memoir with tales from her childhood, formative years and journey toward publication, and confessional forays into her parents’ alcoholism and her more embarrassing moments as an aspiring writer. Readers and writers will appreciate nods to Terry Tempest Williams, Natalie Goldberg and Frank McCourt, whom Nestor temporarily confused with her father.

Writing Is My Drink is also part instruction guide. Each chapter finishes with a short “Try This” piece that offers writing exercises, lists to make and concepts to keep in mind. She coaches when to push oneself and when to be forgiving, and shares the sad news that rejection and bad writing are integral parts of publication and good writing. Now an instructor in memoir writing, Nestor is well placed to offer such advice, and despite her convoluted journey–or perhaps because of it–she has a great deal of wisdom to share with her students.

Writing Is My Drink is by turns instructive, funny, poignant and deeply personal. Nestor’s voice is informal and occasionally self-deprecating, but one of the central lessons she has learned and wants to share is that of trusting oneself. Her story will be an inspiration to readers who seek self-expression.

This review originally ran in the December 27, 2013 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun!

Rating: 7 stories told sitting on a barstool.

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The Outermost House by Henry Beston

Posted on December 23, 2013 by pagesofjulia

photo (1)This book came to me recommended by Rachel Carson. I’m relatively sure that I came up with this title in my reading of On a Farther Shore, a recent biography of the author of Silent Spring. And by that convoluted path, here we are.

The first thing that struck me about The Outermost House, and certainly the most striking overall, is its similarity to Thoreau’s Walden. I have been describing it as “Walden Pond on Cape Cod.” Henry Beston wrote this book in 1928 about a year he spent, rather by accident, on the island; he had a small, humble cabin constructed on a remote dune for the purpose of visiting more often, and moved in in the fall, thinking he’d be there only a matter of weeks but staying a full year. (My edition also contains a new foreword from 1949.) That Thoreau would be well-known to Beston, his literary descendant of just a few decades in the same region, is clear, even if he weren’t mentioned by name around page 100. The similarities are many (more below), but I don’t mean that to take away from Beston’s work. I think Walden bears some imitation, and Cape Cod is different enough from the Concord locale to justify its own study.

The next thing that struck me is Beston’s comfortable observation that, although “man” has altered & damaged the world mightily, “Nature” is overall impervious, and Cape Cod in specific remains untouched. I congratulate Beston that in 1928 (and ’49) he was able to feel such confidence. Today, sadly, he would not.

Like Thoreau, Beston describes his home in some detail, for its details are hugely relevant to his year on the outer beach. Like Thoreau, he sees his fire as a friend and companion, a major force in withstanding solitude. And like Thoreau, he overstates that solitude, first writing of how very, very alone he was – how very rare was a human face in his year out there in the wild – and in the next breath, shamelessly, noting that he saw his Coast Guard buddies from up the beach almost daily, and walked into town for groceries once or twice a week. Having come to terms with this dissonance in Walden, I just smiled at it. Solitude is clearly relative, and he’s enjoyed far more than I have experimented with.

The Outermost House is perhaps most lyrical and pensive in its contemplation of bird life and waves, and equally thoughtful in its treatment of the Cape Cod locals and the solidarity they feel with wrecked vessels on its shore. He seems to refer to a “god,” although not by name; he is very concerned with “man”‘s relationship to Nature (always the capital N), and how sick we get when we disconnect. These themes are timeless and not dated at all.

For those who enjoyed Walden, this will undoubtedly be a great pleasure. If anything, Beston is less pretentious and self-congratulatory than Thoreau was. His descriptions of the migratory birds of Cape Cod’s seasons are lovely and, I imagine, useful for scientists & natural historians. It’s well-written, short (under 200 pages), and solid.

I will let Beston himself close, with a few of my favorite lines.

Glorious white birds in the blue October heights over the solemn unrest of ocean – their passing was more than music, and from their wings descended the old loveliness of earth which both affirms and heals.

…today’s civilization is full of people who have not the slightest notion of the character or the poetry of night, who have never even seen night. Yet to live thus, to know only artificial night, is as absurd and evil as to know only artificial day.

Rating: 6 tseeps.

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Body Counts: A Memoir of Politics, Sex, AIDS, and Survival by Sean Strub

Posted on December 18, 2013 by pagesofjulia

Sean Strub’s earnest, evocative memoir of political activism, coming out and the AIDS epidemic will appeal to diverse readers.

bodycounts

Seventeen-year-old Sean Strub left Iowa City in 1976 to attend Georgetown University and–more importantly for his future–to become an elevator operator at the Capitol Building. He worked to meet as many powerful figures as possible, with his own political career in mind, yet he was haunted by a secret he feared would make him unelectable: he was attracted to men.

Three years later, the colorful, growing gay community of New York City encouraged the aspiring politico to begin to explore his own sexuality and acknowledge it as a permanent feature in his life. As an increasingly “out” gay man, he shifted his focus away from the idea of running for office and became a committed activist in the pursuit of gay rights. Strub’s second passion and skill was for entrepreneurship, and he eventually started up an impressive number of companies, including direct-mail ventures and publications that supported his causes.

In the early 1980s, “gay cancer,” eventually known as AIDS, was suddenly everywhere. Strub couldn’t attend every funeral and memorial service, he writes, but he always made sickbed visits; sometimes he walked the halls of a hospital without a specific friend in mind, reading names on rooms, sure he’d find people who needed him.

Strub had known he was HIV-positive since 1985, when he was given a prognosis of “maybe” two years, but his partner Michael died with no warning, not even getting sick first. The need for AIDS activism to push for quicker access to new drugs and fight discrimination naturally dominated Strub’s attention in the years following his diagnosis and Michael’s death.

In Body Counts, Strub relates the joys and struggles of learning self-love, political aspirations and disillusions, activism and relationships with countless men and women he loves, with cameo appearances by Tennessee Williams, Bobby Kennedy, Gore Vidal and Bill Clinton (among others). Body Counts is a powerfully moving personal memoir with the added value of a fine and feeling primer on the history of gay culture and AIDS in the United States. Strub’s subject matter could have been morbidly tragic, but he retains a sense of humor and celebration, honoring the dead with love and hope. Now an AIDS survivor for nearly 30 years, Strub notes that he is on his way to matching, in same-sex weddings, the number of funerals he attended in the 1980s and ’90s.

This review originally ran in the December 13, 2013 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 8 mailings.

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Teaser Tuesdays: A Garden of Marvels: How We Discovered that Flowers Have Sex, Leaves Eat Air, and Other Secrets of Plants by Ruth Kassinger

Posted on December 17, 2013 by pagesofjulia

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading.

garden of marvels

You will recall the book beginning I recently posted for this book. I wanted to share another tidbit, equally delectable:

“Used to be some call for ’em,” he said over the phone in a drawl that sounded like Southern Comfort cut with a generous squeeze of lime.

The man with the voice is, appropriately, a citrus farmer in Florida. How charming is this author??

This quotation comes from an uncorrected advance proof and is subject to change.

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Drinking with Men by Rosie Schaap (audio)

Posted on December 16, 2013 by pagesofjulia

drinking with menI picked up this memoir for what I’m sure are obvious reasons. The title alone appeals to me: I am, ahem, a drinker, and a tomboy who’s been most commonly and comfortably in the company of men. Read a blurb, and find out further that Rosie Schaap is a fan of hanging out in bars, which puts her generally in male society; I’m right there with her.

And I was immediately charmed at this audiobook, read by the author in her somewhat gravelly (drinker’s, smoker’s) voice. She opens the introduction by calling herself a serial monogamist when it comes to bars: she becomes a regular at one for a year or years, then moves to another to which she will also be faithful for the medium-long-term. This memoir is organized by bars where she achieved “regularhood” (a status that she points out is even more overwhelmingly male-dominated than bar-drinker-hood generally), and covers the rest of her life – relationships, school, careers, living arrangements – as it relates to the bar, mostly. Her brother, parents, and husband get sketched rather more lightly than do her drinking buddies, for example. Her bars are located in New York City, small-town Vermont, Dublin and Montreal – but mostly New York City, her hometown and persistent home.

As expected, and as her first few lines indicated, I felt a real connection with Rosie. (I consider us to be on a first-name basis, as we would be on our barstools.) Her inexplicable (to some) comfort going to bars alone as a woman struck a note with me: I share that comfort (at the right bar, of course), and confirm her observation that this is rare behavior. I certainly agree that the definition of the best sort of bar is where one can go alone while female – and even read a book, or carry a conversation without shouting. (See here.) I also agree that these bars can come in different shapes and sizes (well, small is the ideal size), and that they overlap, but not entirely coincide, with dive bars. I often felt as if she were speaking right to me – like this is a long-lost sister I’m listening to. How lovely. We should get a drink sometime.

She did lose me for a little while mid-way, when she got enthused about religion and becoming a minister. I couldn’t follow her there; we got separated; and I worried that we had taken permanently distinct roads. But she sort of let that part of her story lapse; I don’t know if that part of her life lapsed, too, but I was certainly okay with the book taking that turn. Personal preference, there.

Rosie’s life has taken a few turns that I think will be familiar to many of us: youthful rebellion, difficulty determining What She Would Do With Her Life, and a troubled marriage. She experience 9/11 as a New Yorker, and lost her father the same season. She moved away a few times, and returned. And she has had some very cool relationships with some very cool bars. I felt very close to her as I experienced what she had written, and as she read it aloud for me. I think that has to be one of the aims of memoir.

As an aside, I had a fun “aha!” moment: as Rosie talked to me, I had a niggling feeling of deja vu. I recalled a story I’d read somewhere, about a young woman in a bar wearing an ugly hat, who was approached by an intimidating biker who wanted to buy her hat for his friend. It was a good story, and I was reminded of it. Sure enough, just as I was wondering, she told it. I figured out that I’d read it in the New York Times Magazine, courtesy of my mother. (You can read it here.)

Schaap’s writing style sort of disappeared for me, which I mean in a good way: that is, that there was no discernible style. It just felt like she was telling her story. I would have enjoyed ten times this length of the same – although on the other hand, she seems to have shared exactly the right amount.

If you’re at all interested in bar culture or women in a men’s world – I recommend Rosie’s story told in her own voice.

Rating: 9 pints.

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