Book Reviews, Fall 2009
Elephants on the Edge
What Animals Teach Us about Humanity
By G.A. Bradshaw
Yale University Press, 2009
The plight of wild elephants—subject to poaching, culling, and habitat destruction—takes on a new dimension in view of the emotional trauma they suffer. When herds are broken up or destroyed, the remaining animals often suffer from the same post traumatic stress disorder that affects humans subject to violence and deprivation. Captive elephants in zoos that are deprived from social contact and often abused at the hands of trainers fare no better. Unless we change our ways, ecologist and psychologist G.A. Bradshaw warns, elephant culture will be destroyed forever. ❧
Hope for Animals and Their World
How Endangered Species Are Being Rescued from the Brink
By Jane Goodall with Thane Maynard and Gail Hudson
Grand Central Publishing, 2009
Those in need of an environmental pick-me-up should settle down with Jane Goodall’s new book. Goodall and her coauthors serve up a much-needed menu of success stories. From Madagascar, where an all-night dance and prayer ceremony precedes the release of tortoises into the wild, to Nantucket Island, where a conservationist carries around quail corpses and carnivorous beetles in picnic coolers, the places and people in this book provide relief from environmental doom and gloom. ❧
No Impact Man
The Adventures of a Guilty Liberal Who Attempts to Save the Planet and the Discoveries He Makes About Himself and Our Way of Life in the Process
By Colin Beavan
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009
No Impact Man is Colin Beavan’s account of his now-famous year as a New Yorker striving to leave the smallest-possible environmental impact. Gone are trips to the neighborhood pizza joint (slices are served on disposable plates) as well as visits to the grandparents (the carbon emissions of flying aren’t acceptable). Everything in the life of Beavan—and the lives of his wife and daughter—is subject to “no-impact” scrutiny. It could easily be a preachy, depressing tale, but—to Beavan’s credit—the writing instead is funny and there’s a feel-good family story thrown in for good measure. ❧
The Jaguar’s Shadow
Searching for a Mythic Cat
By Richard Mahler
Yale University Press, September 2009
In 1996, a hunter along the Arizona–New Mexico border spotted a jaguar. It was the first time in nearly a decade that the animal had been reported in the United States, and an article about the incident propelled Richard Mahler on a ten-year quest to find the big cat in the wild. Traveling south into Mexico and then to Central America, Mahler met scientists, indigenous peoples, and poachers as he strove not only to spot a jaguar but also to understand the animal’s historical and cultural significance. ❧
Climate Change:
Picturing the Science
By Gavin Schmidt and Joshua Wolfe
W.W. Norton, 2009
What should we make of the fact that global average temperatures have risen almost one degree Celsius in the past 100 years? Or that the ice cap on Mount Kilimanjaro has lost 80 percent of its mass or that in the northern hemisphere, some species have been moving north at an average of six kilometers every decade? In Climate Change: Picturing the Science, essays from prominent geologists, physicists, and biologists shed light on what we know about human-induced climate change and the decisions we must make moving forward. Alongside the text, engaging photos of everything from flooded homes in the U.K. to a geothermal power plant in Iceland tell the visual story of our changing planet. ❧
Nature’s Ghosts
Confronting Extinction from the Age of Jefferson to the Age of Ecology
By Mark V. Barrow, Jr.
University of Chicago Press, 2009
Extinction in Our Timess
Global Amphibian Decline
By James P. Collins and Martha L. Crump
Oxford University Press, 2009
Extinction was a foreign notion to eighteenth-century westerners; it simply didn’t fit into prevailing views of order and perfection in the natural world. Three hundred years later, scientists race to save amphibians, which are dying out at the hands of disease and habitat destruction. Two recent books confront our uneasy and ever-changing relationship with species loss. Nature’s Ghosts chronicles how Americans came to understand extinction and to develop a responsibility to protect vulnerable species. In it, Mark Barrow brings to life the characters—from presidents to museum curators—who fought for the country’s endangered species. Extinction in Our Times details what we know about a massive amphibian die-off occurring in real time across an entire vertebrate class. Its authors, James Collins and Martha Crump, ask what we can learn about the science, ethics, and politics of extinction by studying amphibian declines. ❧
Reviews by Judy Wexler
