Tag Archives: Books

Flying Dinosaurs: A New Book on the Dinosaur Bird Link

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Flying Dinosaurs: How Fearsome Reptiles Became Birds by science writer John Pickrell is coming out in December. As you know I’ve written a lot about the bird-dinosaur thing (most recently, this: “Honey I Shrunk the Dinosaurs“) so of course this sounded very interesting to me. In a way, Pickrell’s book is a missing link, in that he writes a lot about the history of paleontology associated with the discovery, undiscovery, and rediscovery of the early bird record and the dinosaur link.

Birds have rewritten dinosaurs. Not all dinosaurs are directly related to birds, but a large number of them are, and the features we reconstruct for them were once based on lizards, because it was thought dinosaurs were big scary lizards. Now we know many dinosaurs were big scary birds. Feathers are today a bird thing, but back in olden times — very olden times — they were probably just the normal covering for this entire category of dinosaurs (though they may have been very different). Dinosaurs were once thought of as greyish lumbering terrifying beasts. We now see them as highly active, aerobically efficient, socially dynamic, sexy (as in they had a lot of secondary sexual characteristics such as bright colors) terrifying beasts.

Pickrell covers the history of changing thought on dinosaurs and the bird-dinosaur link. In a way , this book is about dinosaurs, focusing primarily on the bird kind. Or, it is a book about birds, focusing on their dinosaur-osity. Pickrell also goes into detail on the behavioral biology of dinosaurs reinterpreted in the context of birds.

Pickrell’s book is well written and accessible, and thus is an excellent companion to the more scholarly literature that I know you all follow.

John Pickrell is an award-winning science writer and the editor of Australian Geographic magazine. He has written for New Scientist, Science, Science News, and Cosmos, and won man awards.

How to talk to your uncle who thinks global warming is a hoax?

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So, you accept the science of climate change and global warming as legit. But you often encounter people, at family gatherings, on your Facebook page, on Twitter, at social events, etc. who don’t. Do you keep your mouth shut when someone says something clearly wrong that brings the science into question illegitimately? If you do, and others are listening, then one voice, a denialist voice, is influencing people. Probably better to say something.

The problems is that the denialist schtick involves having a lot of different arguments, with absolutely no regard as to legimacy, against the science. You’ve heard of the Gish Gallop. You make an argument that seems to invalidate your opponent’s position, and it does not matter how well that argument is demolished, no problem, you just make another argument. This is sometimes what happens when you find yourself in these conversations. “But what about ….” is probably the most common retort to a counterargument to a denialist claim.

I’m frequently asked what resources people can use to learn about the arguments, both the denialist arguments themselves and how to counter them. If I provide information on one resource, it is always skepticalscience.com. That web site is very nicely organized, it includes all of the denialist arguments (if you know of a denialist argument skepticalscience.com does not cover, let them know, or if you like, let me know and I’ll pass it on). The primers that address the arguments are often provided at multiple levels, so you can get the non-technical tl;dr, or you can go into the details.

But, not every body relates to web sites. Sometimes you like to take a book to bed with you for the evening, or to the beach, or to some other place where you like to read, and just learn stuff. Or, while you will certainly find skepticalscience.com or other web sites (including my blog, I hope) useful, you may want to explore a few other perspectives, or other ways of saying things.

Well, now there’s a book for that. “How to Change Minds about Our Changing Climate” is slightly misnamed. This book, by scientists Seth Darling and Douglas Sisterson, does not really go into the science of mind changing. But it does provide a litany of denialist claims and the scientific answer to them, in a way that you will find useful. You will not only learn the arguments but you will gain confidence in making the arguments at that family dinner or school board meeting or cocktail party.

Seth Darling is a scientist at the Center for Nanoscale Materials, Argonne National Laboratory, and a fellow at the Institute for Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago. Doug Sisterson is a senior manager at Argonne National Laboratory, US Department of Energy Atmospheric Radiation Measurement Climate Research Facility. They know the science and have done a very nice job putting the argument on paper (or eBook). From the publisher:

One by one, the authors debunk all the most pernicious myths surrounding climate change and offer talking points that readers can use to do the same, in chapters such as “There is no consensus” and “There’s no link between warming and extreme weather.” In fact, there is consensus, and the time to take climate change seriously is well past. As Darling and Sisterson cogently explain, “We are poised to compress an amount of global warming that historically has occurred over the course of thousands of years into a single century”—and the menacing effects we’ve already seen only hint at what’s to come…

You can get the book here.

Also, do me a favor. If you get the book on Amazon and read it, please go to Amazon and leave an honest review. Anti science denialists like to swarm books on amazon with bogus awful reviews, and you can help counter that.

ADDED: An important criticism of this book, that I agree with, is the authors’ use of the actual myths to be debunked as titles. This is not good communication strategy and is discussed, vis-a-vis this work HERE.

While you are at it, check out Michael Mann’s book, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines and, again, if you read that please consider giving an honest review on Amazon; Mann’s book is frequently attacked on that site.

(Speaking of books being attacked, my book, which is a novel and not on climate change, is here. I got badly attacked by Mens Rights Activists who hate me because I’m against rape. The book isn’t even about that, but they are organized and have been in the habit of harassing me and other people who speak out for women’s rights.)

In any case, you can also up vote reviews you like and down vote reviews you don’t like, on Amazon.

Finally, a while back I put together a list of climate change related books, HERE. You might find that useful.

Sins of Our Fathers by Shawn Otto

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JW, protagonist, is a flawed hero. He is not exactly an anti-hero because he is not a bad guy, though one does become annoyed at where he places his values. As his character unfolds in the first several chapters of Shawn Otto’s novel, Sins of Our Fathers, we like him, we are worried about him, we wonder what he is thinking, we sit on the edge of our proverbial seats as he takes risk after risk and we are sitting thusly because we learn that he does not have a rational concept of risk. We learn that his inner confusion about life arises from two main sources: the dramatic difference between his temperament and upbringing on one hand and the life he ended up with on the other, and from unthinkable tragedy he has suffered. And so it goes as well with the other hero of the book, Johnny Eagle, who is a flawed, almost Byronic antagonist. Flawed because he is not the bad guy yet is an antagonist, Byronic because of his pride. There is also a troubled young man, a full blown antagonist we never come close to liking, and a horse.

SinsOfOurFathersWhen I moved to Minnesota from the East, I quickly encountered “The Indian Problem.” Not my words; that is what people called it. Very rarely major news, but still always a problem, the concept includes the expected litany. Poverty, fights over spear fishing rights, casinos and fights over off-reservation gambling, and the usual racism. I lived near the “Urban Res” but was told never to call it that. Doing some historic archaeology in Minneapolis I came across a hostess, of the first hotel built in the city, who had written elaborate stories of Indian attacks in South Minneapolis, part of the Indian Problem, after which she and her hotel gave refuge to the victims. None of which ever actually happened. I read about trophy hunting by the farmers in the southern part of the state, who took body parts from the Native Americans executed as part of the Sioux Uprising, and heard rumors that some of those parts were still in shoe boxes in some people’s closets.

Later I married into a family with a cabin up north. I remember passing Lake Hole-In-The-Day on the way up to the cabin, and wondering what that meant — was a “Hole in the day” like a nap, or break, one takes on a hot lazy afternoon? And the cabin was an hour or so drive past that lake. Many months later, I did some research and discovered two amazing facts. First, Hole-In-The-Day was the name of two major Ojibway Chiefs, father and son, both of whom were major players in the pre-state and early-state histories of the region, of stature and importance equalling or exceeding any of the white guys, like Snelling, Cass, Ramsey, after which counties, cities, roads, and other things had been named. But no one seemed to know Hole-In-The-Day. It was just a lake with a funny sounding name like most of the other lakes. The other thing I learned was downright shocking: The cabin to which we have driven many summer weekends is actually on an Indian reservation, as is the nearby town with the grocery store, ice cream shop, and Internet. On the reservation, yes, but not near any actual Indians. So, I could tell you that I spend many weeks every summer on an Indian Reservation up north, and it would not be a lie. Except the part about it being a lie.

Otto’s book pits the white, established and powerful, Twin Cities based banking industry against an incipient Native bank and the rest of the reservation. The story is a page turner, but I don’t want to say how so, because I don’t want to spoil any of it for you. I am not a page-turner kind of guy. I am a professional writer, so therefore I’m a professional reader. I can put a book down at any point no matter what is happening in order to shift gears to some other task awaiting my attention. But I certainly turned the pages in Sins of Our Fathers. The most positive comment one can make about a piece of writing is probably “this made me want more.” That happens at the end of every chapter in Otto’s novel.

But just as important as Sins of Our Fathers being a very very good book, which it is, it also addresses the Indian Problem. It does not matter if you are in, of, or familiar with Minnesota. The theme is American, and I use that word in reference to geography and not nationality, through and through. Everybody has an Indian Problem, especially Indians. Tension, distrust, solace and inspiration in modernized tradition, internal and external, are real life themes and Otto addresses them fairly, clearly, and engagingly. “Fathers” is plural for a reason, a reason you can guess.

It is important that you know that Sins of our Fathers is not Minnesota Genre though it is set here; it is not Native American Relations and Culture Genre though that is in the book. It is action, mystery, adventure, white knuckle, engaging, well-paced, and extremely well written. There are aspects of this writing that recommend this book as an exemplar in plot development, character construction, dialog and inner dialog, narrative distance, and descriptive technique.

Sins of Our Fathers is Shawn Otto’s first novel (but not his first book); it is due out in November but available for pre-order.

Shawn Otto is the founder of Science Debate. He is a science communicator and advocate. He is also a film maker, and among other things wrote the screenplay for the award winning movie “House of Sand and Fog.”

Evolution Book For Young Children: Grandmother Fish

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In a previous life (of mine) my father-in-law, an evolutionary biologist, kept an oil painting of a fish on the wall of the living room. At every chance he would point out, to visitors or to anyone else if there were no visitors, that he kept a portrait of his distant ancestor hanging in a prominent location, pointing to the oil painting. It was funny even the third or fourth time. It isn’t really true, of course, that this was his ancestor. It was a bass, more recently evolved to its present form than humans, I suspect. But it is true that the last common ancestor of humans and fish was a lot more like a fish than like a human.

I know it is hard to find good books about evolution for kids, and it is even harder to find a book for really young kids. A book needs to be written for the audience, engaging, entertaining, and all that — it needs to be a good book — before it can also teach something. A book that teaches but sucks as a book doesn’t really teach much.

Recently, Jonathan Tweet of Seattle Washington sent me a draft of a book he was working on that is such a thing, a good book that teaches about evolution and targeted to young kids. He had sent the book around to a number of experts for two reasons. First, he wanted to make sure he wasn’t saying anything wrong vis-a-vis evolution. Second, he wanted to make sure he got his facts straight at another level so he could provide useful and accurate footnotes for the adults who might read the book for the kids. I had a comment or two, but really, he already had his ducks in a row and the book, with the notes, was in good shape. It had evolved, as a project, very nicely.

The book is: Grandmother Fish: a child’s first book of evolution. From his blurb:

Grandmother Fish is the first book to teach evolution to preschoolers. While listening to the story, the child mimics the motions and sounds of our ancestors, such as wiggling like a fish or hooting like an ape. Like magic, evolution becomes fun, accessible, and personal. Grandmother Fish will be a full-size (10 x 8), full-color, 32-page, hardback book full of appealing animal illustrations, perfect for your bookshelf. US publishers consider evolution to be too “hot” a topic for children, but with your help we can make this book happen ourselves.

Jonathan made a kick-starter to raise 12,000 to produce the book. He’s already reached that goal and is now edging towards the stretch goal of $20K.

You can visit the kickstarter site HERE. You can download an early draft of the book. Personally, I plan to make this a Christmas gift for several friends and relatives who have kids the right age, assuming it is available by then. You can also see a several videos by the author and illustrator.

You can go to the Kickstarter site now and invest in any one of several different products that will be sent to you.

You may know of Tweet’s other work on Dungeons & Dragons and similar projects.

I recommend the book, strongly. Thank you for writing it, Jonathan.

Sugar: A Bittersweet History by Elizabeth Abbott (Review)

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Somebody tipped over a bag full of a white powdery substance. Most of what fell out splayed across the dirty wooden table, but about a cup poured onto the dirt floor of the open-air Baraza at our research site in a remote part of the Congo’s Ituri Forest. Embarrassed about tipping onto the ground more of this valuable substance than most people living within 50 kilometers would ever see in one day, the tipper started to push loose dirt onto the powder to cover it up. But the spill had been noticed by two children lounging nearby; in what seemed like a fraction of a second, the boys were face down on the ground licking up the spilled material, taking with it mouthfuls of dirt and who knows what parasites and other kooties. It was a sudden and short lived fiasco and a scene etched hard into my mind. To this day, decades later, when I think of this I breathe a sigh of relief that it was not me who tipped over the bag of white sugar.

These kids and everyone else in the Baraza that day were very familiar with sugarcane. Everyone grew at least a little. Sugarcane was to the Ituri Forest villagers what Hastas is to urban gardeners in the US. Everyone grew at least a little where it would fit and not get trampled or take up extra gardening space for real food.

The sugarcane was eaten raw. You would use a machete to cut a off a long section of the giant grass plant, and carry it around. With your teeth or with the help of a knife you would slice open a section of the cane and chew on it, sucking out the sweet water inside. When the sugarcane was ripe, the pathways and, really, any open surface would be littered with spent wadges. But still, not much sugarcane is grown in the Congo compared to other crops then or now. Sugarcane, originally from the Pacific and India, was, however, grown for centuries in large quantities where it was transplanted in the New World. You probably know of it as one of the vertices of the Triangle Trade (sugarcane = rum). But there is still a connection to these kids, the two who scarfed up the dirt and sand and sugar spilled on the baraza floor.

No sense sugar-coating it. The story of sugar is the story of slavery. The Congo was probably not the biggest source of slaves for the Caribbean and South America. The eastern Congo, especially, was on the Indian Ocean slave route. But generally speaking, West and Central Africa supplied millions of people, captured, owned and sold, to the sugar plantations of the Caribbean. Over the centuries since its introduction to West Asia and Europe, and by extension, the New World, sugar grew in importance from a rarity to a common element in the diet, often carrying with it symbolic importance as an indicator of class or by its use in food art. Sugar is distilled and concentrated solar energy that preserves well and is easily transported. The production and distribution of sugar is one of a handful, maybe the most important of engines for the rise of Immanuel Wallerstein’s global system (that I almost did my PhD on by the way).

You’ve got to love it when a molecule changes history. Primates (and a few other groups of animals) lost their ability to synthesize and use ascorbic acid because fruit producing plants had evolved to have their seeds dispersed in exchange for Vitamin C rich pulp. Therefore, the British Mercantile System. Similarly, C12H22O11, one of a class of molecules used by plants to store energy (and sometimes entice monkeys or ants to do their bidding) drove the most momentous of historical changes and its production, in one form or another, makes up an inordinate percentage of the effort expended to feed our species.

Nobody really questions the importance of sugar, but how aware is the average person of the details of its sweet success? More so than before for those who have read Elizabeth Abbott’s “Sugar: A Bittersweet History.” Before you go check and yell at me for not restricting my writing to things that happened during the last five minutes, I’ll admit that the book came out in 2010 and I’ve only just now noticed it. I was focusing on other things, I promise. But I am pretty sure that no major revisions of history of the last thousand years or so have been made that would make this engaging book out of date or less relevant.

We all like to consume knowledge, but if you also like knowledge of what you consume you should read this book. It will make you feel bad, and likely awed, but also, a lot smarter, hopefully enough to offset the shame.

One of the most important things that ever happened in history is really a category of things and took a few centuries. This was the transplantation of crops and to a lesser extent horticultural technologies across the globe beginning with the Portuguese and extending at a quickened pace with all the major colonial ventures. This is probably more pervasive than you think. The lifeways and culture of the Yanomamö were greatly transformed, in my opinion, buy the introduction of south and southeast Asian (and possibly African) crops, mainly the plantain. The earliest records suggest that the Yanomamö were foragers, but all the later ethnography shows them as horticulturalists. The difference between “typical” equatorial foragers and the Yanomamö may well be the inclusion in their economy and society of a key crop that is also a highly vulnerable resource. Vulnerability of one’s resource base can shape one’s attitude at the socio-cultural level. What crops are mainly grown in swidden fields in Africa? South American ones. There would have been no Irish potato famine had there been no potatoes. They come from the Andes. And as mentioned sugar/rum was one of the vertices of the Triangular Trade and along with a few other crops (like Cotton) formed the agricultural structure of the slave-based economy that made up the largest single capital component of the rise of the United State’s economy. If the modern US economy is the fat bank account, slavery was the first big deposit in that account and New World Slavery happened because of this small number of transported crops.

By the twentieth century, sugarcane had circled the globe, traveling north and west from New Guinea then back again to the Pacific, and its legacies mark its global passage even where it is no longer grown… In the Caribbean, where King Sugar is now expiring as a major industry … and where most former colonies have become independent, political and commercial unions remain skewed along historical lines. Sugar culture is at the root of why Afro- and Indo-Trinidadians and Guyanese are mired in political enmity, why Hawaii and Fiji endure perpetual conflict between their Native and their Asian populations and why the official currency fo Mauritius, off the coast of Africa, is the rupee and its population is primarily Indian…

It is a good book. Overlook Publishers, available for the Kindle. I am probably going to work this into this week’s lecture in Intro to Archaeology.

The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines

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51c9ZYOtkvL._SY344_PJlook-inside-v2,TopRight,1,0_SH20_BO1,204,203,200_You probably already know about Michael Mann’s book, “The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines.”

The ongoing assault on climate science in the United States has never been more aggressive, more blatant, or more widely publicized than in the case of the Hockey Stick graph — a clear and compelling visual presentation of scientific data, put together by MichaelE. Mann and his colleagues, demonstrating that global temperatures have risen in conjunction with the increase in industrialization and the use of fossil fuels. Here was an easy-to-understand graph that, in a glance, posed a threat to major corporate energy interests and those who do their political bidding. The stakes were simply too high to ignore the Hockey Stick — and so began a relentless attack on a body of science and on the investigators whose work formed its scientific basis.

The Hockey Stick achieved prominence in a 2001 UN report on climate change and quickly became a central icon in the “climate wars.” The real issue has never been the graph’s data but rather its implied threat to those who oppose governmental regulation and other restraints to protect the environment and planet. Mann, lead author of the original paper in which the Hockey Stick first appeared, shares the story of the science and politics behind this controversy. He reveals key figures in the oil and energy industries and the media frontgroups who do their bidding in sometimes slick, sometimes bare-knuckled ways. Mann concludes with the real story of the 2009 “Climategate” scandal, in which climate scientists’ emails were hacked. This is essential reading for all who care about our planet’s health and our own well-being.

The book is now available in paper back, and as a reader of Greg Laden’s blog I’m happy to give you a way to get it at 30% off.

Just go to the Columbia University Press site for the book and use the promotional code HOCMAN. It is an important book, if you don’t have it, go get it!

Linux Shell Scripting

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I just finished Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook – Third Edition by Shantanu Tushar and Sarath Lakshman. This is a beginner’s guide to using shell scripting (bash) on linux.

Usually, a “cookbook” is set up more like a series of projects organized around a set of themes, and is usually less introductory than this book. “Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook” might be better titled “Introduction to Linux Shell Scripting” because it is more like a tutorial and a how too book than like a cookbook. Nonetheless, it is an excellent tutorial that includes over 100 “recipes” that address a diversity of applications. It’s just that they are organized more like a tutorial. What this means is that a beginner can use only the resources in this book and get results. The various recipes are organized in an order that brings the reader through basics (like how to use the terminal, how to mess with environment variables, etc.) then on to more complex topics such as regular expressions, manipulating text, accessing web pages, and archiving. One very nice set of scripts that is not often found in intro books addresses networking. The book also covers MySQL database use.

All of the scripts are available from the publisher in a well organized zip archive.

I read the e-version of the book, in iBooks, but the PDF version is very nice as well. I don’t know how this would translate as at Kindle book. But, importantly (and this may be more common now than not) the ebook uses all text, unlike some earlier versions of ebooks that used photographs of key text snippets as graphics which essentially renders them useless. Of course, copy and paste from a ebook is difficult, and that is where the zip file of scrips comes in. You can open the PDF file, get the zip archive, and as you read through examples simply open up (or copy and paste) the scripts from the zip archive and modify or run them. Also, the ebook is cheaper than a paper edition and clearly takes up way less space!

If I was going to recommend a starting out guide to shell scripting this is the book I’d recommend right now. It is well organized and well executed.

I do have a small rant that applies to virtually ALL tech-related books I’ve seen. There is an old tradition in *nix style documentation of putting certain information in the front matter. Books always have front matter, of course, but computer documents tend to have more front matter than usual. A typical example is this reference resource for Debian.

Notice all that stuff in the beginning. Like anybody reads any of that, especially the “conventions” section. Proper typography in a code-rich book does not have to be explained in detail. You can see what is code, what are comments, etc. etc. Most of this information should be added as an appendix at the end of the book where it is out of the way and can be ignored.

On a web page like the one shown here all you have to do is scan down, but in a book you have to leaf (virtually or meatspacelly) past all that stuff to get to the actual book contents. The Linux Shell Scripting book being discussed here has the first actual text on actual page 25 or so (though it is numbered page 8). I recommend moving as much of this front matter as possible to the back.

But that is a general rant about all books of this sort, which I happen to think of while reviewing this book.

Some Linux/Ubuntu related books:
Ubuntu Unleashed 2016 Edition: Covering 15.10 and 16.04 (11th Edition)
Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Desktop: Applications and Administration
The Linux Command Line: A Complete Introduction

The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism: Mankind and Climate Change Mania

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There is a book called “The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism: Mankind and Climate Change Mania” produced by the Heartland Institute. The Heartland Institute is famous for doing all that work to prove that smoking is not bad for you, and more recently, that climate change is not real or is not important or is not human-caused etc. etc. Heartland is a libertarian “think” tank that receives money form big corporate interests like Tobacco and Petroleum and then uses that money to advance the interests of those corporate entities, regardless of the actual truth of the situation. They also use some of their money to threaten law suits against people like me who object to their activities. (But they do so very ineffectively.)

This is one of those books that contains political propaganda, is printed in large(ish) numbers, then sent around to teachers, academics, policy makers, etc. whether they want a copy or not; it is a sort of high level form of spam. You may remember Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (A Free Press Paperbacks Book) or J. Philippe Rushton’s Race, Evolution, and Behavior : A Life History Perspective (2nd Special Abridged Edition), also produced by entities with an anti-social (in this case, racist) agenda, with piles of free copies sent out to a gazillion people. This is the same thing, but for climate change. It is a climate denialist book.

I’m not going to critique The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism: Mankind and Climate Change Mania because my friend and colleague John Abraham has already done a great job of that:

Heartland Institute wastes real scientists’ time – yet again

This spring, I began receiving calls and emails from colleagues about a strange little book that was mailed to environmental science professors around the country. This was a big mailing, in total, a reported 100,000 copies were sent out. What was it about this little book that got us talking? Many things. First….

CLICK HERE to read John’s excellent blog post. You won’t want to miss this. Also, while you are there look at the other posts at John’s new blog, written with Dana Nuccitelli.

Since we are on the subject of books and science denialism, may I recommend that you read, if you’ve not already, Shawn Otto’s excellent book Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America.

Photo Credit: AZRainman via Compfight cc

People of the Book

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I rarely review fiction, but I’ve got a nice book I’d like to recommend. My friend Amy suggested it to me on facebook a while back when I was casting around for a novel to read. The novel is People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks.

INTERNET WARNING: THIS BOOK IS LIKE FIVE YEARS OLD I DON’T CARE

Although a lot of people made a wider range of suggestions on my facebook post, I knew that when I saw Amy’s suggestion it was the one I should try. She knows enough about me (we worked together for a few years) to zero in on something that I would appreciate, and she’s a person who understand literature at a level above me, so it was unlikely that I would go wrong following her suggestion.

People of the Book is about, well, a book, and the people … well, the people of that book. As you might expect. The book is a Haggadah, which is the Jewish document used in the Passover Seder. The details of what a Haggadah contains are not too important; suffice it to say that any practicing Jewish family has one (or several … you can get cheap paperback ones to pass around so everyone can follow along). There is one particularly famous one, the Sarajevo Haggadah, which is a real thing. It is odd because it is very old yet brilliantly illuminated. Many scholars think that a Haggadah of those times would not have been illuminated because the practice of drawing images would have been banned among Jews as it was among Muslims. The Sarajevo Haggadah was probably made around 1350, probably in Spain, and it has a rich history, having squeaked by various inquisitions and book burnings and having been threatened with destruction during the siege of Sarajevo.

One of these figures has African features. I'm told.
One of these figures has African features. I’m told.
The novel, People of the Book, recounts the history of the book with a steadily decreasing level of historical accuracy as the writer takes us farther and farther back in time. The modern venue involves an Australian book restorer who gets the job of stabilizing the manuscript for display in the museum in Sarajevo. As the restorer discovers physical clues in (or on) the book itself, author Geraldine Brooks brings us back in time, regaling us with a story that would explain each particular clue, with the time trips provided in order from most recent (World War II) to oldest (the 14th century, when the book was created). The most recent historical forays are somewhat plausible and based on a reasonable interpretation of history, but the earliest forays are entirely made up because we know nothing about the history of the book in those days.

And that is what makes the novel (and it is a novel, not a documentary) most interesting. The original book, and the fictionalized book in the novel, depict a woman with African features sitting at the seder table. Geraldine Brooks comes up with a very interesting fictionalized story to account for this.

Forensic book restoration, centuries of history, really bad bad guys and some pretty good good guys, epic twists and turns as well as highly unlikely coincidences that apparently really did happen, and a thoughtful perspective on the dynamic and complex history of Jews in a Muslim and Christian world, as well as a bit of modern mystery and suspense spiced up with a nice mixture of family, professional, and academic angst, combine to make for a very good read.

Thanks for suggesting it, Amy!

Photo Credit: Ivana Vasilj via Compfight cc

Sexual Politics of Meat

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Usually I don’t mention books unless I’ve read them, but I thought a lot of my readers would be interested in a volume I have only heard about: Defiant Daughters: 21 Women on Art, Activism, Animals, and the Sexual Politics of Meat.

Here is the description:

When The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory by Carol J. Adams was published more than twenty years ago, it caused an immediate stir among writers and thinkers, feminists and animal rights activists alike. Never before had the relationship between patriarchy and meat eating been drawn so clearly, the idea that there lies a strong connection between the consumption of women and animals so plainly asserted.

But, as the 21 personal stories in this anthology show, the impact of this provocative text on women’s lives continues to this day, and it is as diverse as it is revelatory. One writer attempts to reconcile her feminist-vegan beliefs with her Muslim upbringing; a second makes the connection between animal abuse and her own self-destructive tendencies. A new mother discusses the sexual politics of breastfeeding, while another pens a letter to her young son about all she wishes for him in the future. Many others recall how the book inspired them to start careers in the music business, animal advocacy, and food. No matter whether they first read it in college or later in life, whether they are in their late teens or early forties, these writers all credit The Sexual Politics of Meat in some way with the awakening of their identities as feminists, activists, and women. Even if you haven’t read the original work, you’re sure to be moved and inspired by these tales of growing up and, perhaps more important, waking up to the truths around us.

Including a foreword from Carol J. Adams herself, this collection of fresh, bold voices defies expectations and provides rousing support for the belief that women have the power to change the world around them for this generation and those to come.

The World’s Rarest Birds

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There are something over 10,000 species of birds (thus the name of the famous blog). Of these, just under 600 are in very very serious trouble, some to the extent that we are not sure if they exist, others are so rare that we know they exist but there are no good photographs of them, others are merely very likely to go extinct. There are patterns to this rarity, having to do with what threatens birds on one hand and what makes certain birds vulnerable on the other, but the range of birds that are threatened, in terms of size, shape, kind of bird, habitat, etc. represents birds pretty generally. It is not just obscure frog-like rainforest birds of Borneo that are threatened. Chance are you live in a zone where there are bird species that have gone extinct over the last century, or are about to go extinct over coming decades, including birds that you will never see unless you are very very lucky.

Lots of pretty data rich pages.
Lots of pretty data rich pages.
The World’s Rarest Birds is one of those books that crosses over from coffee table (it is bigish and quite beautiful) to field guide (it is species-level informative) to conservation science (it is about the rares, and thus often most threatened). Birdlife International has been dealing with rare and endangered birds for years, and this organization has produced a number of products bringing attention to bird conservation, including various books and calendars and such. This particular volume is their finest product ever, and is quite amazing. The World’s Rarest Birds covers just over 500 of the aforementioned rare and endangered birds in more detail than most bird related references that you’ve got in your house now.

It is a rather interesting concept if you think about it. The average bird ID book, or more detailed reference book, may address about 500 birds, using a variety of graphical techniques, text, and other resources. The World’s Rarest Birds is a larger format book with about 360 pages. Fitting information about 500 birds into a somewhat larger than average bird book allows for a lot of detail.

Much of the book is like any other bird book, but with species that you'd give up your best binoculars to see.
Much of the book is like any other bird book, but with species that you’d give up your best binoculars to see.
The first several chapters of the book included detailed, interesting, informative, and beautifully laid out information. These chapters cover the geography of endangerment, the kinds of threats, bird-human interaction, how the process of keeping track of endangered and rare birds works, and so on.

Then the book is divided into seven regions covering the entire planet. Each region has a long introductory section followed by something that looks a lot like a field guide covering each and every one of the rare birds in each area.

The book is educational, promotes conservation, looks nice, but at the same time is a reference source for those rare birds. This, somewhat morbidly but worthy of note, allows The World’s Rarest Birds to serve a special role in certain birders libraries. If you have bird guides and references for several different parts of the world, there may be a number of species missing because they are just too rare or unknown. The World’s Rarest Birds is like that stuff you put in your gas tank to add oomph to your engine, but with birdbooks. A regional library of references will suddenly have high octane information on some of the least known species.

QR codes bring you to the Birlife International database entry for that bird.
QR codes bring you to the Birlife International database entry for that bird.
Birdlife International actually commissioned many of the photographs in the book, and many, possibly most, of the species of concern are under some degree of study or investigation. Or, at least, new information is emerging now and then to supplement what is in the printed volume. In order to keep up with the latest information about your favorite rare bird, you can use the QR codes that go with each entry. Scan the QR code and you’l be brought to a BLI web page with the most current info. If you know how to use QR codes and stuff.

This book is for any birder, but I have a specific suggestion. Do you have a birder in the house or family or as a friend with a birthday coming up in the next two months? Get them this book. It’s new, they don’t have it yet, and they’ll like it.

The New Crossley Raptor ID Book: You Want It

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A couple of years back, the The Crossley ID Guide for Eastern Birds came out and it caused a huge splash in the birdwatching world. For some time now it has become apparent that bird watching, especially the identification part of it, was changing in its approach. We describe it this way, though I think the reality is more complex: In the old days we used logical links to known reliable field marks to turn carefully made field observations into species identifications of varying degrees of certainty. Now, a new approach has been developed where we look at the whole bird and get an identification using an overall gestalt, and then to the extent possible verify the identification with tried and true field marks.

picture of Peterson's field guide page
Old Style: Carefully drawn images or photos showing keys to identification.
This consideration of methodology would be a great way to get into how humans make observations and draw conclusions … how we think and how we know things, in fact … and would not be done well enough without bringing in semiotics and other areas of philosophy. Some day we’ll do that. In the meantime, just consider the difference between a typical field guide and a guide like Crossley.

Well, now, we have a new book to play with: The Crossley ID Guide: Raptors. This new volume follows the same principle as the original Eastern Birds book, but with some important differences. A very large portion of Raptors is not images, but rather, very information rich species accounts along with pretty darn good range maps. The first half or so of the book consists of the usual Crossley style plates. Here, we have gone back to an old style layout: Text and details in one section of the book and plates in the other. Another important difference is that there are more images per species, for the most part, in Raptors, and in some cases, variants are given their own sets of plates.

Crossley plate
Crossley Style: Lots of photos of one species as they appear in real life, in an appropriate context.
Also, there are plates showing many individuals of more than one similar looking species, with the key indicating which image is which species located elsewhere in the book so you can’t cheat by just looking at the caption, and get to learn the differences without leaving the comfort of your birding gazebo, or wherever it is you hang out.

Overall, there is far more information about each species than in the Eastern guide, which is of course exactly what we would expect from a more specialized volume such as this. There is also a handy comparison-of-everything graphic in the front cover with page numbers, a nice map in the back, and the other usual amenities found in most bird books these days.

I used some of these images to construct the quiz I put HERE (the winners of that quiz to be announced soon).

I can not do the images justice with inserts into a small format thing like this blog post, but here are a few examples to give you an idea:

CrossleyExample01

CrossleyExample02

CrossleyExample03

This is not a book review, in that I’m giving you the negatives and positives of a particular book so you can decide if you want it or not. This is, rather, a notice that the book you want is available now.

While we are on the subject of raptors, you will probably want to check out this video of a red tailed hawk trying to get at the eggs or chicks of a bald eagle, but instead, becoming the eagle’s lunch. Caution: It is gruesome.

Enjoy your new bird book!

Noble Savages: Napoleon Chagnon’s Fierce Book

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Napoleon Chagnon spent years living among the Yanomamo of Venezuela and wrote, among other things, a classic ethnography still used widely in anthropology classes. It came to pass that Chagnon and his ethnography came under scrutiny, actually a few waves of scrutiny, from practitioners of cultural anthropology in part because his monograph depicted the Yanomamo as “fierce people” and this characterization of them was used, misused really, against them by outside forces including the government to justify their “pacification.” The Yanomamo were indeed being abused by these outside forces, and it is probably true that Chagnon’s research became a tool of those elements. But this criticism of Chagnon’s work was an interesting twist on the ad hominem argument. Rather than asserting that someone’s scholarly findings were wrong because that individual is a bad person, the assertion was made that the findings were wrong because they had bad political implications. Over time, a number of accusations against Chagnon and others working in the Amazon were made, hyped, and disproved. In the end, many sociocultural anthropologists liked Chagnon even less than they did before, the fight never ended, and just a few weeks ago, Chagnon responded with his latest salvo, a book called “Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes – the Yanomamo and the Anthropologists”.

I’m writing a piece that will be published elsewhere on the book, Chagnon, and the Yanomamo (I’ll insert a link HERE when it is available) but at this time I mainly wanted to tell you about the new book. Before doing that I just want to note the following: The fight between biological anthropology and cultural anthropology, represented in only one of its forms (or should I say fronts) by the fight over the Yanomamo is often viewed as a fight between those who seek explanations for the diversity of human behavior in genes vs. those who see human culture as constructed entirely from experience. In truth, very few anthropologists believe either of those models to be perfectly correct. Quite a few anthropologists in both fields recognize a more nuanced explanation for human behavior. The evolutionary history of our species has shaped us to have certain drives, tendencies, abilities, and limitations that are important factors in our development but culture and individual behavior are just as much products of history and lived experience guided, tempered, limited, and potentiated by drives shaped by natural selection.

Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes – the Yanomamo and the Anthropologists reviews many of Chagnon’s key findings about the Yanomamo and discusses the controversy over these findings. I’m not yet sure if the new book replaces the older ethnography for use in the classroom; that is going to depend on what a particular course is about. Chagnon reviews his theory of where Yanomamo “fierceness” comes from and all that, but his monograph and this new volume both remind us that there is much about Yanomamo lifeways beyond guys beating each other up with sticks. To me the most important lesson of Chagnon’s work, which is supported by parallel work by others in the region, is this: Human culture is capable of a wide range of variation including but not by any means limited to strong patriarchy with a violent edge. Women in Yanomamo society are often treated badly. This does not make the Yanomamo unique, as women are treated badly in most human societies. The difference is that the Yanomamo are a group of people living in a smaller scale society than our own, and especially, a society that is different from our own, so it may be easier to parse out some of the connections between context and cultural expression. The Yanomamo do not show us something that we could not see in ourselves, but the anthropological view of that group and any other group “elsewhere” in culture or even distant in time (i.e., pre-industrial) or that relies on a very different economy (swidden in the case of Yanomamo) reveals human nature by reflecting it in different kinds of mirrors. When it comes to understanding culture, all mirrors are like the ones in the fun-house, distorting and biasing. For this reason, we need to use a lot of different mirrors. Anthropology reminds us that our own culture does not provide us with the best possible mirror even if we tend to think it does, and that all mirrors are similarly untrustworthy.

In his research with the Yanomamo, Chagnon may have done some things wrong, or things that we would not do today as methods and understanding of ethics have changed. But the same could be said of other anthropologists who worked in the field back in the 1960s, but for some reason we don’t hear that criticism. Personally, I think that this is primarily due to Chagnon’s identification with biological anthropology. Hell, he even uses the word “sociobiology” which is a dog whistle for many indicating a tendency towards genetic determinism. In any event, it may be instructive to look at a parallel case of ethnography done in the bad old days, but by a different field researcher.

Today, Colin Turnbull’s book about the Mbuti Pygmies of the Congo, The Forest People, is often used in anthropology classes, and his ethnography of the Mbuti is generally accepted by many sociocultural anthropologists as valid and useful. The thing is, The Forest People is full of easily refutable facts, such as the “fact” that there is no seasonality in the rainforest and that the seasonal movement of Pygmies in pursuit of wild honey is a culturally constructed behavior unrelated to the ecology of the land. Turnbull, in this and other writings, openly denigrates the people (“Bantu farmers”) who live alongside the Mbuti, painting them as dim witted, mean spirited, violent slave owners (or, at least, poorly behaved masters over the Mbuti serfs). Turnbull also worked in Uganda with a different group, the Ik. If we turn to Turnbull’s work with the Ik of Uganda, popularized in his book The Mountain People, it gets worse. Every alternative ethnography or other source of information about that group dramatically conflicts with Turnbull’s ethnography in one way or another. Turnbull’s depiction of the Ik is horrific, with infanticide and other forms of violence widespread in Turnbull’s work but not so much in other depictions. Turnbull determined that the Ik, who had been pushed off their hunting lands and otherwise severely affected by outside forces, were a people not worth saving, and advocated dispersing the entire culture using very draconian means by the government in power in Uganda. In other words, Tunrbull’s anthropological work is highly questionable, and he quite literally collaborated with the government in an effort to wipe a group of people off the face of the earth, but many cultural anthropologists still use at least one of his books and he has not received the treatment Chagnon has received even though he seems to have actually carried out acts similar to those for which Chagnon is, apparently falsely, accused. But Turnbull was a member of the sociocultural anthropology family. Or, shall I say, the sociocultural anthropology “tribe” (a term I use reluctantly here, but that refers to Chagnon’s subtitle … by now you certainly understand the reference).

I quickly add that the comparison I make between treatment of Chagnon and treatment of Turnbull is only a loose one; there are many other factors to take into consideration including when the work was done, and the state in which the affected tribal groups were found by anthropology to begin with. Nonetheless, when I see cultural anthropologists lining up to score points taking down Chagnon, I often wonder what would have happened if Turnbull put forward an explicit biological explanation for his observations and was not a cultural constructivist.

One of the thing the Yanomamo are “used” for is to model past human societies. For a number of reasons I think this is misguided, but again, the Yanomamo do speak to the human condition more generally. In particular, Chagnon’s ethnography and other work, and criticisms of that work, speak to the problem we Westerners often have with the Hobbsian concept of “Warre.” A human society can be in a state of constant threat, constant struggle over women, resources, or some other thing with the threat of violence being ever present, but actual violence only rarely happening. It would be hard to argue that international politics of the 1960s, 1970s, and into the 1980s was not dominated by the constant threat of the end of humanity itself due to all out nuclear war between the USA and the USSR. This struggle was the primary organizing force in world politics. But none of those nuclear weapons were ever used. The highest level of threat of violence that ever existed on this planet … the most “fierceness” to ever be brought to bear in the arena of human interaction … had enormous effects on human society and culture but was never actually operationalized the way we feared. There are other examples of fierceness being a big part of a culture but actual violence being modest in extent or intensity.

My own personal theory of Yanomamo violence is two part. First, it is complex. There is no reason to exclude male biological ineptitude in the area of reproduction (men have never figured out how to have babies on their own) as a causal factor in male anxiety about, and possessiveness over, women. We see this across cultures, in high school lunch rooms, and in the halls of the United States Congress. Men have an interest in controlling women’s reproduction that in some contexts may be manifest as violence among men, violence by men against women, athletic competition, absurd and offensive legislation, and all manner of things. Continue reading Noble Savages: Napoleon Chagnon’s Fierce Book →

Golden Eagles and Free Coffee!

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You’ve heard of the The Crossley ID Guide: Eastern Birds (The Crossley ID Guides). It is a revolutionary new way to assemble a field guide, where each page has a drawing of what it would look like if suddenly outside your living room there was a full blown habitat for some species of bird, with individuals from that species flying or sitting all over the place in different positions, doing different things, and at different distances. These pages in the field guide almost give you the experience of having seen many of this partiuclar species of bird, like you were suddenly an experienced birder. In preparation for a birding trip, you can prepare by going over the birds you hope to see, and during or after the trip you can use this guide to check your ID’s.

Well, now, there is also the The Crossley ID Guide: Raptors. This is the same thing but for Raptors. The book is coming out RIGHT NOW so Princeton has organized a major blogging tour, and right now, you’re on the tour! The other blog posts are as indicated here, on this schedule. I recommend visiting all the other entries. Some of them are giving away prizes, so especially check those out.

As a matter of fact, we’re giving away a prize here, right now, on this blog post, and you may be able to win it. Details are below. But first, a word about ….

… Golden Eagles …

Golden Eagles are a bit of a sore spot with me because they are rare and said to be hard to distinguish from immature Bald Eagles. This is not their fault. But when one claims to have seen a Golden Eagle the automatic reaction among most birders is to claim that you are wrong, that it was an immature Bald Eagle you had seen. This is especially true in Minnesota. If you look at bird books, they are sometimes not shown to be here at all, even as migrants, or otherwise, only rarely.

Stan Tekiela’s Birds of Minnesota Field Guide, Second Edition does not even list Golden Eagles. The Smithsonian Field Guide to the Birds of North America shows northern and central Minnesota as a migratory route, but the rest of the state is indicated as “rare.” Birds of Minnesota and Wisconsin indicates them to be an uncommon migrant or winter visitor in parts of the region. The Birds of North America and Greenland: (Princeton Illustrated Checklists) shows them as occassional winter visitor in only a small area to the West of Minnesota. National Geographic Field Guide to the Birds of North America, Sixth Edition shows them only rarely in Minnesota, but more in the eastern part of the state. Hawks and Owls of the Great Lakes Region and Eastern North America shows them as an occasional winter species in Minnesota and a very large area of the plains and the eastern US.

The Kaufman Field Guide to Birds Of North America shows them totally absent in the state, but this book also has another interesting geographical observation. There is a huge area of eastern Canada with a dotted line around it indicating that they may or may not breed there. This is an interesting thing about Golden Eagles. When you look into it, you find that there is this large not very mountainous region in which this mountain bird seems to breed, migrate to and from, but is not observed within. Like they were hiding out there. The Birds Of The Great Plains shows them rare in Minnesota and more common to the west than the east.

Of course, one always wants to consult the bible in these matters. The Peterson Field Guide to Birds of North America (Peterson Field Guides) shows them totally absent in Minnesota, but also indicates the big mysterious region to the north where they may or may not breed.

Now that we’ve established that there is no agreement whatsoever on the distribution of, timing of, or even existence of, the Golden Eagle in Minnesota, let me tell you about two of our sightings of the bird (there’s been a few but these two are particularly interesting).

The firs sighting was about 10 years ago. Julia was about seven, and we were visiting the Minnesota Raptor Center in Falcon Heights. We were being given a tour of the cages, where various raptors were kept. These birds were all rescued from somewhere, generally with injuries. Some would be rehabilitated and released. Some would become ambassador birds, traveling around the area with experts from the Raptor Center for educational purposes. Some would simply remain in the cages forever.

As the tour progressed, the tour guide would say a few things about each bird as we approached the cage, then we would look at the bird for a while, then move on to the next cage. At once point, she said, “And here is the Golden Eagle. There are no Golden Eagles in Minnesota, not at all. If you ever think you are seeing a Golden Eagle, I assure you that it is merely an immature Bald Eagle. There are no Golden Eagles in this state.”

Then, as we stopped in front of the cage to look at the bird, Julia pointed to it and said, “There’s one!”

“What?” the guid said.

“There’s a Golden Eagle. It’s in Minnesota. So you’re wrong.”

I was fully expecting to find, on further inquiry, that this particular bird had been found injured along the highway in some other state and brought here to the Minnesota Raptor Center for treatment. So, I asked, “Where is this bird from?”

We were given a very precise location, along a road near a particular town. In Minnesota. In fact, within a one hour drive from where the bird was sitting in the cage. So, there you go.

The second sighting was up at the cabin. It was early fall and we were sitting on the deck overlooking the lake, to the north. Although we were located a short distance outside the Chippewa National Forest, which is known to have the highest number and highest density of Bald Eagles in the US outside of Alaska, the tree line across the lake was in the forest proper, and in fact, this was an excellent place to see bald eagles. A nesting pair lived in sight just a few hundred yards to the left, and hunted in this bay. Sometimes other eagles came by, and the pair often had a young one. If you want to see a bald eagle from that spot, all you had to do is look. If the eagle was not visible that instance, all you had to do was listen and you’d hear either the eagles themselves or some other bird complaining about the eagles. Indeed, that is the main reason for the local loons to holler. If you hear the loon going loony just look up. There will be one or two bald eagles reeling at altitude over the loon, sharing the fishing grounds.

Anyway, we were sitting there looking north when suddenly there appeared over the tree line to the north, across the lake, a bird that was clearly a very large eagle, and it was flapping its wings in powered flight going in a straight line right for us. We knew it was an eagle because of its shape and size. However, it was significantly larger looking than any of the bald eagles in the area. I should note that despite the large number and high density of eagles in Chippewa Forest, these Bald Eagles are smaller than the Alaskan kind. But this bird was whopping big.

Also, it was flying funny. Not only was it not soaring as eagles tend to do, it was flapping its wings in what looked like an unusual pattern. And, it was not a bald eagle. As it got closer, we watched it with binoculars and could see the field markings very clearly.

“That was a Golden Eagle, wasn’t it?” I said to Amanda.

“I guess so,” she replied.

“You could see a bit of white on the upper wings before it came over us.”

“Yeah, I saw that. You could see white on its tail shinning through with the sun.”

“It had a small head.”

“And a smaller bill.”

“I know, and that color was different than an immature Bald Eagle.”

“When it stopped flapping for a while its wings almost looked like a vulture.”

“I know. All the field markings seem to suggest a Golden Eagle, not an immature Bald Eagle.”

“Yeah, and you know what,” Amanda said.

“What?”

“We know what an immature Bald Eagle looks like. That wasn’t one of them.”

And now it’s your turn. The following illustration shows several raptors. Each is labeled with a letter. Some of these raptors are Golden Eagles, some are not.

EagleQuiz

Your job is to identify the Golden Eagles. Put a set of letters that represent only Golden Eagles in a comment. I will collect all the perfectly correct answers and send them to Price Waterhouse in a briefcase, where one of the correct answers will be randomly selected.

If you use a proper email address when you sign in to comment, then I’ll be able to contact you if you are chosen. Otherwise I’ll just mark the correct and chosen comment here on this blog and you can check back later, and if you were the winner we’ll work out how to send you your prize, provided by Princeton University Press.

The prize will be two pounds of Birds and Beans Coffee! It will be sent to you by the good people of Princeton.

Also note that Princeton has a contest in which you can win a pair of Nikon 8220 Trailblazer 8×42 ATB Binoculars and some autographed bird books. Details are HERE.

Happy Birding!

We’ll pick the winner on April 1st.