Summer reading: recommended books, on topics from growing potatoes to imagining other universes

Science News,  June 30, 2007  by Keith Haglund

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Is "summer science reading" an oxymoron? Isn't this the season for light fare, and don't science books belong on the cabbage-and-mutton side of the menu? The Science News staff doesn't think so. Here we recommend a picnic basket of lively books. Scientists soaring through trees and camping out with ivory-billed woodpeckers are our action heroes. Storytellers describe natural living, raising flowers for profit, and surviving as original Americans. Our dose of summer school seriousness comes from authors trying to explain climate change, the religion-science divide, and the universe itself. Enjoy.

--Keith Haglund, Managing Editor

Aerial Oceans THE WILD TREES: A Story of Passion and Daring RICHARD PRESTON Random House, 2007

"The forest canopy is the Earth's secret ocean" Richard Preston writes in The Wild Trees. That anything in California can remain secret might seem incredible, but Preston includes among the world's enigmatic canopies that of the temperate redwood rain forest stretching from San Francisco to Oregon. Somehow, much of this forest remained unexplored until the 1990s.

That was when Steven Sillett, a botanist at Humboldt State University, and oddball knife salesman-cum-tall-tree hunter Michael Taylor independently began surveying the redwoods in earnest. Sillett started as a lichen fanatic, donning long spikes and rigging elaborate rope systems to hoist himself to the top of 300-foot giants. Taylor, overweight and afraid of heights, stayed below and searched for the tallest trees with a protractor and binoculars.

Meanwhile above, Sillett and his colleagues discovered unexpected life. Rare salamanders, beetles, earthworms, and voles make their homes in the aeries. Shrubs and small trees thrive in the loamy soil piled within crotches of the redwoods. Sillett once found an 8-foot-tall spruce growing on a redwood, and he cataloged huckleberry, hemlock, laurel, and even Douglas fir in the canopy.

Preston weaves Taylor's and Sillett's stories with that of Marie Antoine, who also began as alichen lover. Midway through the book Antoine and Sillett meet and fall in love. The two consummate their relationship in a hammock strung some 30 stories above ground-untethered from safety ropes--a scene that offers a frisson rarely found in science journalism. Sillett later proposes to Antoine in the treetops, and they find a minister willing to ascend a redwood to marry them. Antoine sews flowing lichen into her veil.

In his previous books about deadly pathogens, such as the bestseller The Hot Zone (1994, Random House), Preston captured the inner lives of scientists by immersing himself in their world. He does the same here, learning advanced climbing techniques so that he can join his protagonists in the canopy, notebook in hand. While a conservation message is implicit, Preston wisely avoids preaching. Instead, through the adventures of Sillett, Taylor, and Antoine, The Wild Trees engenders a sense of awe. Redwoods live 2,000 years or more, we learn; they survive hurricane-force gales and hellish blazes; they drink the fog. In short, they're amazing.

The Wild Trees almost is too. But for long stretches, Preston's passive tone turns tedious.

Despite this, the story is engaging, especially Preston's portrayal of the oddball Taylor, who ends the book married and an engineer, and with an unabated redwood habit.

Inexplicably, Preston fails to detail Taylor's biggest triumph, an expedition to measure the world's tallest known tree, a 379-footer that Sillett and Taylor discovered and named Hyperion. Preston wrote about the adventure in the Oct. 6, 2006 New Yorker but provides only a glancing reference at the end of the book.

Perhaps he simply ran out of time. A reader can only hope the remaining redwoods--only 4 percent of the trees found 200 years ago--don't suffer the same fate.--B. VASTAG

Think Globally, Eat Locally ANIMAL, VEGETABLE, MIRACLE: A Year of Food Life BARBARA KINGSOLVER, WITH STEVEN L. HOPP AND CAMILLE KINGSOLVER HarperCollins, 2007

Although best known as a novelist, Barbara Kingsolver is also a biologist, mom, wife, and former science writer. In this lively and informative book, all those facets of her life shine through. Husband Steve Hopp and daughter Camille also contribute to this family story of "a year in which we made every attempt to feed ourselves animals and vegetables whose provenance we really knew ... and of how our family was changed."

The book, in a nutshell, is about good food and how to grow and cook it--all with an eye to being gentle with the environment. It's a new, hybrid science that one might call "ecogastronomy." Kingsolver's talent is to make her family's radical change of lifestyle sound both practical and appealing. All readers, urban dwellers included, could adopt at least some of the strategies that the authors describe.

In 2004, Kingsolver, Hopp, and their two daughters left Tucson for a southern Appalachian farm. The family spent a year remodeling the farmhouse and preparing the land. Parents and daughters developed ground rules. First, they would try to eat only vegetables and fruits grown in their own garden or within a short radius of their home base. Most dairy products and meats would be purchased locally, and the clan would raise its own chickens and turkeys. Nine-year-old daughter Lilytook on responsibility for the chickens, which she promised to not make pets. "It's OK," Lily assured her mom. "I won't name them."