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Short Takes On Three Books - American Scientist

The document summarizes and reviews three books: The Smaller Majority about invertebrate biodiversity, Oceans: An Illustrated Reference about oceanography, and The Bomb: A Life about the history of nuclear weapons. It provides concise descriptions of each book and highlights their topics, including species conservation, ocean geology/biology, and the development/politics of nuclear arms.

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Ray Mondo
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96 views6 pages

Short Takes On Three Books - American Scientist

The document summarizes and reviews three books: The Smaller Majority about invertebrate biodiversity, Oceans: An Illustrated Reference about oceanography, and The Bomb: A Life about the history of nuclear weapons. It provides concise descriptions of each book and highlights their topics, including species conservation, ocean geology/biology, and the development/politics of nuclear arms.

Uploaded by

Ray Mondo
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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19/01/2023, 11:12 Short takes on three books

American Scientist

Short takes on three


books
BY ROGER HARRIS, GREG ROSSDAVID SCHOONMAKER

The Smaller Majority · Oceans: An Illustrated Reference · The


Bomb: A Life
COMMUNICATIONS RE V IE W SCIE NTISTS NIGHTSTAND

THE SMALLER MAJORITY. Piotr Naskrecki. Harvard University Press, $35.

In The Smaller Majority, Piotr Naskrecki, director of the Invertebrate


Diversity Initiative at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology, explores a
miniature world, transporting the reader through three major biomes—
rainforest, savanna and desert—to encounter the microcosms of animals
that mostly would "fit inside a matchbox." Naskrecki's photography offers
insights into the biology and conservation of these creatures; the sumptuous
illustrations that make up the bulk of the book are obviously the work of a
fine craftsman.

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19/01/2023, 11:12 Short takes on three books

From The Smaller Majority

The word majority in the book's title refers to the many individuals and
species of invertebrates (the main subject of the book), which are much
more numerous than the vertebrates (represented here by amphibians and
reptiles). The examples Naskrecki uses to demonstrate underlying biology
are superb. For example, the photograph at right of an African tree frog
(Leptopelis hyloides) shows its enlarged toe pads and grasping fingers
(adaptations to an arboreal lifestyle), illustrating evolutionary convergence
with superficially similar South American tree frogs.

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19/01/2023, 11:12 Short takes on three books

With spectacular and sometimes bizarre images of beetles, spiders, katydids,


land crabs, caterpillars, mantids and the like, Naskrecki drives home his
point that tiny creatures display enormous biodiversity. The more we know
about these creatures, the more aware we become of what we are losing.
Since the early 1990s, biologists have advocated the conservation of
biodiversity hotspots to better protect the small and unseen, and
Naskrecki's book solidly bolsters the approach. The Smaller Majority will go a
long way toward increasing the public's appreciation of, and support for
conserving, small animals.—Roger Harris

OCEANS: An Illustrated Reference. Dorrik Stow. University of Chicago


Press, $55.

The ocean is a wilderness reaching round the globe," wrote Thoreau, "wilder
than a Bengal jungle, and fuller of monsters." He would have been well
pleased with Dorrik Stow's colorful, comprehensive book Oceans: An
Illustrated Reference.

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From Oceans

Stow, an oceanographer at England's Southampton Oceanography Centre,


has set himself an enormous undertaking: preparation of a comprehensive
portrait of the world's oceans, taking in everything from planetary formation
and geology to biology and undersea exploration—like that conducted by
the robotic explorer pictured at right.

Accordingly, Stow divides the volume into two parts. The first examines the
physical nature of the oceans, including waves, tides, currents and seawater
chemistry. The second appreciates the almost inconceivable diversity of
marine life, which may include as many as 20 million species, although only
a fraction of these have been identified.

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Sadly, the story of today's oceans is largely one of human industry and of
our queerly ambivalent attitude toward "the blue continent." The sea
provides the main source of protein for more than 1 billion people, but we
spill an estimated 4 million metric tons of oil into it every year, plus untold
effluent and waste, which is why a despairing Jacques Cousteau called the
sea "the universal sewer."—Greg Ross

THE BOMB: A Life. Gerard DeGroot. Harvard University Press, $27.95.

From The Bomb

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In 1942 Enrico Fermi, Leo Szilard and Eugene Wigner began building the
world's first nuclear reactor beneath the grandstands of the University of
Chicago's football field. In 1963, I visited that very field with my dad, who told
me about the reactor and the bombs to which it led. That same year, the
Limited Test Ban Treaty was signed, and the Nuclear Age, in the naive sense,
began to wind down. Only much later would I come to understand the
relation between those events and certain oddities of growing up in the
1950s: the distinctive yellow and black signs near the doors of sturdy
buildings, the drills at school during which we huddled beneath our desks,
the underground playrooms in neighbors' backyards.

Gerard DeGroot's The Bomb: A Life is the catalyst that has led me to reflect
on these things. DeGroot, who writes with grace and wit, offers an
overwhelming array of fascinating yet bizarre facts and anecdotes, and he
masterfully reveals the complex interface between physicists and politicians.
But more than anything, his book gives form to the central cultural feature
of the time: the shadow of the mushroom cloud.

The Bomb chronicles nuclear weapons from their conception in the 1930s
through the end of the century, focusing mainly on the decisions made from
1940 to 1962 to develop and use devices of unimaginable destruction and
become ironically reliant on them for maintaining peace. Was it the Soviets
or the Americans who pushed the crazy escalation in megatons and
warheads? The answer isn't so simple as I once thought.

I count this among the best history books I've read. DeGroot's effort clarifies
a bewildering and, in retrospect, insane time.—David Schoonmaker

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