Book shorts
The Natures of Maps:
Cartographic Constructions of the Natural World
By Denis Wood & John Fels
University of Chicago Press, 2008
Maps, argue Denis Wood and John Fels, aren’t representations of reality so much as they are sets of arguments. Behind every map is a cartographer with a purpose and an agenda. Although we might presume maps of the natural world—topographic maps, vegetation maps, maps of bird migrations—to be scientific and objective, these presumptions fall apart under Fels and Wood’s scrutiny. They show how every element of a map—from the way it is folded to the text in the legend to the ink colors used—shapes how we see nature: either as threatened or as a threat, as something we can possess or as a mystery. ❧
American Buffalo:
In Search of a Lost Icon
By Steven Rinella
Doubleday, 2008
In 2005, Steven Rinella won one of 25 permits to hunt buffalo in the Alaskan wilderness. His adventure took him trekking through frigid conditions while evading grizzly bears and hauling a 1,000-pound carcass over mountains and down a river. But this was only part of a quest that started after Rinella came across a buffalo skull while hiking in Montana. He also traveled the United States to document the buffalo’s historic, cultural, and natural significance over thousands of years. American Buffalo chronicles both the author’s personal adventures in the wild as well as the history of an animal that has made an impressive recovery after being hunted almost to extinction. ❧
The Life of the Skies:
Birding at the End of Nature
By Jonathan Rosen
Picador Press, 2008
As birds become the only wild animals left in our urban landscapes, Jonathan Rosen’s book is a philosophical musing about the place birding holds in the modern world. Bird watching allows us to enter into the wild world—but only while engaged in the uniquely human activities of identifying, naming, and cataloguing. This intersection of civilization and nature is a central theme of Rosen’s book, and the novelist and literary critic explores it through references to Whitman, Keats, Hemingway, and others. ❧
Swimming with Piranhas
at Feeding Time:
My Life Doing Dumb Stuff with Animals
By Richard Conniff
W.W. Norton & Co., 2009
Richard Conniff writes for Smithsonian
and National Geographic and has traveled from Botswana to Louisiana to Costa Rica covering wildlife and nature stories. His new book is a collection of animal anecdotes from around the world. When not swimming in a tank of piranhas, Conniff observes the sex lives of dung beetles (prone to infidelity), describes termites who share food “from both ends of the digestive tract,” and considers paternity questions in cheetah society.
The Global Deal:
Climate Change and the Creation of
a New Era of Progress and Prosperity
By Nicholas Stern
Public Affairs, 2009
Nicholas Stern’s book is a blueprint of how governments across the world can reduce emissions while ushering in a new age of growth and prosperity. He calls for international agreements on an unprecedented scale and argues that cooperation is our only option for facing the challenges of global warming. Stern’s 2006 report on the economics of climate change was read worldwide and remains one of the most influential analyses of its kind. Although tempered, the book is one of the more optimistic pieces to emerge from the climate change discussion. ❧
