Teaser Tuesday (14 Valentine)

Posted on February 14, 2012 by smellincoffee

Teaser Tuesday is a weekly event in which participants share a tidbit from their current reads; play along at Should Be Reading.

It did something to the watchers. The power of the thundering rocket, the knowledge that had gone into it; to the older watchers it was something impossible, a comic-book incident from their childhood. To the younger ones it was inevitable and to be expected, and they couldn’t understand why the older people were so excited. Space ships were real and of course they worked….

p. 131, Lucifer’s Hammer. Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle

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The Ingredients

Posted on February 11, 2012 by smellincoffee

The Ingredients: A Guided Tour of the Elements
© Phillip Ball 2002
216 pages

There’s antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium,
And hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and rhenium […]
(Tom Lehrer, “The Elements”).

Chemistry is not an arcane subject solely practiced in a lab with flasks of mysterious looking fluids. It is nothing less than the study of what everything is made of, and how the elements work together. In The Ingredients, Nature editor Phillip Ball introduces readers to the human story of chemistry — its history, importance, and some fundamental concepts.

The title is partially misleading;  Ball’s work isn’t a comprehensive catalogue of the elements, but an introduction to appreciating the field. He begins with the Greeks,, then uses the discovery of oxygen to cover the birth of modern chemistry. A following chapter on gold illustrates the fact that attempts at chemistry have been  pervasive throughout human history. Subsequent chapters introduce the periodic table, and thus our modern understanding of chemistry, and establishes its basis in physics by examining the basic parts and how they came to be discovered. “The Chemical Brothers” covers isotopes — different ‘flavors’ of particular elements, like Carbon-14 and Uranium-236 — which have practical uses, from dating to nuclear energy.  The final section (“For All Practical Purposes”) examines the role of various sundry elements, many of which are not commonly known by the public, as parts of products we use every day.  Ball accomplishes the same thing here that Spangenburg and Moser did in their “On the Shoulders of Giants” series: he imparts to the reader an understanding of the fundamentals of chemistry and the personalities that shaped it, while never coming off like a lecturer.  The result is a breezily fun but thorough grounding in the subject, and one worth your while in the interests of general scientific literacy.

[…] these are the only ones of which the news has come to Harvard,
And there may be many others, but they haven’t been discovered!
(Tom Lehrer, “The Elements”)
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Desert Solitaire

Posted on February 10, 2012 by smellincoffee

Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness
© 1968 Edward Abbey
269 pages


Journey to the expansive southwestern American desert and take it in — the vast stretches of open ground, bounded by mountains and broken by marvelously intriguing rock formations that catch the imagination. Tarry there with Edward Abbey,  seeking shelter from the blazing sun under his homemade ramada, and listen to him talk a while about the fragile beauty of these lands, the importance of preserving them, and of human life in general. Such is the promise of Desert Solitaire, an immensely satisfying collection of meditations on the wilderness.

I was introduced to Edward Abbey a few weeks ago via a comment on a blog; the author’s listed quotations seemed compelling, and so I decided to sample his works at my local library. It carries only one of Abbey’s works, his first nonfiction piece. He spent two years working as a park ranger in the Arches National Park, and offers Desert Solitaire as a memorial of that time spent. He writes not only about the beauties of the park itself, but shares a collection of meditative essays.  Abbey describes himself as an ‘earthist’;  he finds profound meaning in nature,  and the wilderness a sanctuary from the noisy busy-ness of of modernity — soulless jobs, endless petty responsibilities, an ugly and neverending cycle of meaningless tasks. Wilderness’ place as a refuge from this is one of the reasons he champions its preservation; not only from development, but from attempts to commodify the experience through “industrial tourism”, a destructive approach that turns nature from an experience that must be earned into an attraction that is merely seen..and then passed on.  Although a work of prose, Abbey’s writing often waxes poetic. The chapter “Water”, in which he describes the life of a summer storm in the desert, is worth reading itself alone.

The clouds multiply and merge, cumuli-nimbi piling up like whipped cream, like mashed potatoes, like sea foam, building upon one another into a second mountain range greater in magnitude than the terrestial range below.
The massive forms jostle and grate, ions collide, and the sound of thunder is heard over the sun-drenched land. More clouds emerge from the empty sky, anvil-headed giants with glints of lightening in their depths. An armada assembles and advances, floating on a plane of air that makes it appear, from below, as a fleet of ships must look to the fish in the sea.

Abbey passion and style enraptured me. It reminds me of nothing so much as Henry David Thoreau’s Walden; only instead of living deliberately in a lush forest beside Walden Pond, Abbey spends his in the wild, untamed west, spending his nights under the stars and writing of vast canyons and cowboys. The authors share a common spirit; both are ill at ease and disgusted with society’s mindless norms and find respite from the intrusiveness in the wild.  As with Walden, I found Desert Solitaire inspiring and thought-provoking. I highly recommend it.

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Famous at Last

Posted on February 7, 2012 by smellincoffee

Today a patron at the library told me that I was famous — and so I walked downstairs to find myself on the corner of the front page of the Selma Times-Journal.  I don’t think I’ve ever posted my picture here (those that are curious can look me up on Google+, so I’m not hiding), but this was a fun discovery.

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Teaser Tuesday (7 February)

Posted on February 7, 2012 by smellincoffee

Teaser Tuesday is a weekly event in which people share tidbits from their current reads, hosted by Should Be Reading.

Down at the beginning of the new road, at park headquarters, is the new entrance station and visitor center, where admission fees are collected and where the rangers are going quietly nuts answering the same three basic questions five hundred times a day: (1) Where’s the john? (2) How long’s it take to see this place? (3) Where’s the Coke machine?  Progress has come at last to the Arches, after a million years of regret. Industrial Tourism has arrived.

p. 45, Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness, Edward Abbey

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Outbound Flight

Posted on February 6, 2012 by smellincoffee

Star Wars: Outbound Flight
© 2006 Timothy Zahn
464 pages

Five years after his ascendacy to leadership of the Republic, Supreme Chancellor Palpatine endorsed an extraordinary project: the launching of a flotilla of ships into the far expanses of space, on a journey to explore a distant galaxy. Headed by a tempermental Jedi, the bold project promised to invigorate the spirit of the galactic body-politic in an era of increasing corruption and declining faith in the government…but faith had something else in mind for this Outbound Flight.

Though Obi-Wan Kenobi and his adolescent apprentice Anakin Skywalker play minor parts in this story of political mystery and thrilling action at the galaxy’s edge, the lead characters are a handful of smugglers whose malfunctioning hyperdrive delivers them into the hands of a mysterious commander from the “Chiss Ascendancy”. The urbane military genius has a passion for understanding the personalities and nations he is put into contact with, and a gift for winnowing out the details from subtle clues. Those wits come into demand when a skulking agent of Lord Sideous causes his path to collide violently with those of Outbound Flight’s. The story serves as an ominous prelude to the Yuuzhan Vong arc, as well as giving a full and proper introduction to one of Timothy Zahn’s most admired characters — Thrawn.

Thrawn never fails to delight when he appears. The character himself is utterly fascinating — a “good” villain who is often more likable than than the heroes of the book who he opposes. Outbound Flight is the kind of a mystery-action thriller that Thrawn thrives in, impressing readers with his cunning, audacity, and ability to work steps ahead of his foes. He’s as though he’s a chess master playing in deep space: here, he goes against alien fleets, a covert agent, and his own people in attempting to strike the best effective blow for the Chiss. Although I’ve read previous mentions of the Outbound Flight ‘disaster’ and assumed the project wouldn’t end well,  Zahn kept me on my toes; the role played by Sideous is especially interesting; the character is so duplicitous, manipulating even his closest allies, that his ultimate motives remain in the shadows.

As usual for Zahn, this is a fantastic thriller, and an especially exciting one for fans of Thrawn.

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A Journey to the Center of the Earth

Posted on February 5, 2012 by smellincoffee

A Journey to the Center of the Earth
© 1864 Jules Verne
291 pages

“Is the Master out of his mind?” she asked me.
I nodded.
“And he’s taking you with him?”
I nodded again.
“Where?” she asked.
I pointed towards the center of the Earth.
“Into the cellar?” exclaimed the old servant.
“No,” I said. “Further down than that.”
p. 47

A forgotten piece of parchment in an ancient book leads an eccentric professor and his longsuffering and ever-perplexed nephew on a journey across the wastes of Iceland and into the bowels of a volcano, where they attempt to find a path to the very center of the Earth.  Young Axel really had no stomach for the adventure of a lifetime his uncle (Professor Otto von Lidenbrock) set them on; he would have much rather stayed home and wooed fair Grauben, whom he expected to marry. As incautious as Axel was, he couldnt’t escape his uncle’s passion: the man’s zeal spurs them ever deeper into the earth where they discover an extraordinary underground sea populated by creatures which have been extinct on the surface for millions of years.

I have dim memories of reading this as a child, and most of them involve the ‘lost world’ that the Lidenbrocks stumble upon, wonderfully illustrated in the children’s version I owned. Having been spoiled on the climax, I paid more attention to the journey. Verne published this in 1864, when geology was in its infancy. Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, which introduced the 19th century to the idea that the Earth is far older than most humans suspected, was only thirty years old at this point — and the modern understanding of plate tectonics was a century away! As Axel and his uncle creep through the Earth’s interior,  Axel’s fear and trepediation are often erased by the wonder of what he’s seeing buried in the rocks; eons pass with every footfall.  Although the book is badly dated by this point — Lidenbrock’s understanding of the natural world seems to have one foot in mythology, and the theory of ‘central heat’ which he takes pleasure in refuting  is no longer uncertain —  for Verne’s original readers, this book would have an eye-opening voyage into natural history, and an introduction to the study of the Earth. The wonders of the  subterranean world are just icing on the cake.

While I’d expected an intriguing lecture-adventure (and wasn’t disappointed), the characterazation of Axel and the professor took me by surprise. I don’t recall finding either so entertaining in my youth: Axel in particular has  a tendency to be over dramatic when describing what will happen to them, going on for whole paragraphs in descriptive, scientifically-specific prose. He’s a 19th-century C-3PO.

A Journey to the Center of the Earth doesn’t rival Around the World in 80 Days or 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea for entertainment value, but it’s still a fairly enjoyable look at what geology was like in its early days.

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Reporter

Posted on January 30, 2012 by smellincoffee

Reporter: Covering Civil Rights…and Wrongs in Dixie
© 2006 Alvin Benn
388 pages

When a young Alvin Benn left the Marine Corps to beome a civilian editor working with United Press International,  he was asked by UPC’s vice president where he wanted to work, “Where the action is,” Benn replied, and so they sent him to Birmingham, Alabama, during the most violent years of the Civil Rights movement. Months after his arrival in the Deep South, Benn covered a Ku Klux Klan rally, where his tires were slashed and he and his fellow reporters tailed by a carload of Kluckers. Benn got the action he wante — and perhaps more than he bargained for, then and throughout his life as a journalist. Reporter is a part-biography and part-journalistic history of Benn’s decades of coverage as a reporter, editor, and one-time publisher; coverage for which he recently won a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Alabama Press Association.

Although Benn wrote it to capture his memories for his family, this collection of yarns should be of interest of anyone from the Alabama area, especially those living in Selma. While Benn has moved all over the state — covered in a section called ‘Newspaper Nomads’ — the last few decades have been spent  in the city where King and his marchers began their journey to Montgomery to fight for equal rights.The turbulent period of the Civil Rights movement still marks Selma, as many of its most prominent personalities (especially the colorful characters Benn delighted most in recovering) were shaped by those events and still count them as influences as they attempt to lead Selma into the 21st century — or keep it stuck in the 1960s, varying. Among the people Benn profiles is famed mayor “Joe T.” Smitherman, who ran Selma for 35 years, finally losing a mayoral election in 2000. Smitherman is remarkable in Benn’s eyes for rising from a working class background to effectively ruling a city, without a college background and armed only with an uncanny ability to get what he wanted done accomplished.

There’s no doubt that Benn knows how to tell a story, although the organization of this work was a bit questionable. He opens up with his introduction to journalism and then provides an overview of his career before returning to his childhood and his life in the Marines. After leading the reader back to his start as a reporter, Benn then shares the most memorable stories of his career; these constitute the bulk of the book.  This format does have the benefit of leaping into the action and then giving readers context for the stories that follow, but I was left feeling that this is a book composed of three sections that don’t flow as well as they should. The liveliness of the writing more than makes up for this, though. Whoever chose the pictures for this volume did a great job; there’s an especially fun one of Benn — who is a Jewish reporter — standing behind a poster that exhorts people to beware the lies of the evil Jewish media.  I’ve heard a few of these stories in person, and given his wicked sense of humor I wouldn’t be surprised if Benn set up that shot on purpose.

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Siddhartha

Posted on January 29, 2012 by smellincoffee

Siddhartha
© 1922 Hermann Hesse
119 pages

Once in India there lived a young man whose life was everything one might dream of. Not only did he come from a wealthy family, but people loved him for who he was; a handsome, kind, and wise personality in their lives. Despite all this, young Siddhartha felt a yearning for more — and so he left everything behind him to search for enlightenment. Becoming a penniless ascetic, Siddhartha journeys throughout the land, among the poor and the rich alike, befriending the craven and the spiritual, always looking for answers to the meaning of life and suffering. Originally written in German, this translation by Sherab Chödzin Kohn is both spellbinding in content as well as in style.

There are few novels which have placed me so intimately inside the head of a character as this. It follows Siddhartha’s story throughout his life, as he attempts to learn from the teachings and practices of others, and from the circumstances of his own life.  Siddhartha is a deeply introspective individual with an intense hunger for ultimate release from himself, from his ego. His years spent with the monks does not satisfy, and he cannot help but note the age of some of the monks present, who have spent decades living their doctrines but seem as constricted as he is. Even the words of Gautama Buddha, the great teacher of the age,  seem flawed. Ultimately, as his life wears on, Siddhartha finds the answers he once searched for…from an unexpected corner. Without spoiling anything, he realizes the preeminent importance of experience: even those who have found enlightenment cannot readily pass it on to students, because enlightenment comes not from books but from living life and responding to it. As each person’s mind and life are unique, only we ourselves can learn the path particular to us; only we can plumb our own depths.

I found the book provocative and centering; definitely one worth mulling over.

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Death from the Skies!

Posted on January 29, 2012 by smellincoffee

Death from the Skies! These are the Ways the World Will End…
© 2008 Phil Plait
326 pages

By anyone’s standards, 2011 was a banner year for disasters, with Earth’s ful inventory of catastrophes on display. Flooding, earthquakes, tsunamis, volcano eruptions, hurricanes, and tornadoes filled newspaper headlines all year. In the wake of all this, some might be tempted to look to the heavens for relief — to the placid, twinkling stars above. Too bad that twinkling is probably a gamma-ray burst on its way to vaporize you.

The perils of the heavens are the subject of Phil Plait’s second work, Death from the Skies, and in it he lists nine particular ways the universe might be trying to kill us, from relatively mild extinction-level asteroid impacts to the collisions of galaxies.  Although exposure to most of these sounds like nothing to laugh about, Plait’s tone remains light throughout the book, until he discusses the total heat death of the universe. Part of the reason for Plait’s levity is that these are not serious concerns;  considering the size of the cosmos and the timescale at which things happen, the chances of human beings in their present form being damaged by the collision of the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy, or gobbled up by the Sun’s swollen expansion, are virtually nonexistent.  And even if these things were a serious concern, there’s nothing we can do to prevent them — so why worry?  Asteroid impact and solar storms are likely to affect us, but their damage can be mitigated — and even avoided.

While this is my first time reading Plait, I’ve long been a fan of him thanks to his blog (Bad Astronomy) and his frequent appearances on shows like Star Talk and the Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe.  Plait is as entertaining an author as he is an in-person guest, almost chatting with the reader and  making frequent jokes. He’s as sneaky as he is funny: while people may be drawn in by the book’s colorful cover (and title) and engaged by his literary charisma,  Death from the Skies!  isn’t superficial in the least. Along the way, Plait instructs readers in astronomy and cosmology. The stars are the source of many of these world-ending scenarios,  and one can’t help but be impressed by the scale of their lives and their overwhelming importance to life as we know it.  The stars don’t simply illuminate the skies and heat the planets in orbit about them; throughout their lives and especially in their death throes, they create the stuff of life. The very atoms that make up Earth have been forged in the heart of supernovas.

Death from the Skies! is one of the best science books I’ve read in a long time; anyone with an interest in the night-time sky should enjoy it. Expect to see his debut book (Bad Astronomy) read here at some point, because Plait is a blast.

Related:

  • Death by Black Hole (and other Cosmic Quandries), Neil deGrasse Tyson
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