Yale Press Log

Yale Press authors on nuclear war and black holes

Foreign Affairs, published by the Council of Foreign Relations, asked Lawrence Freedman to choose his five favorite books of the past year about military, science, and technology. He chose Foxbats over Dimona: The Soviets' Nuclear Gamble in the Six-Day War, by Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez as one of the year's best books. Read the entire list here.

This groundbreaking history shatters many assumptions about the Six-Day War of 1967. New research in Soviet archives and testimonies from participants in the Israeli/Egyptian conflict reveal the extent of the Kremlin’s involvement, plans for the use of nuclear weapons in the Mid-East, and willingness to precipitate a global crisis.

Click here to listen to an interview with Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez on the Yale Press Podcast.

And Fred R. Shapiro, editor of The Yale Book of Quotations, corrected the Times on the history of the term "black hole." Read his explanation on the Times Online.

Click here to listen to an interview with Fred Shapiro on the Yale Press Podcast.

Live chats with Zittrain and Speth!

Do you have any questions for Jonathan Zittrain about the future of the Internet? Well, thanks to the Internet, you can ask him today in a live chat with Network World from 2PM to 3PM. You can start posting your questions now, or just check back at 2 to hear Zittrain answer other people's questions.

Network World, in a recent feature on his book, lauded Zittrain's "thought-provoking ideas about the trade-off between convenience and innovation on the Internet." Read the entire review, or click here to read more about the book, including excerpts and the table of contents. Also, click here to watch videos of Zittrain fielding interesting questions on current events and trends at bigthink.com.

And tomorrow at 3 PM, washingtonpost.com will host a live chat with James Gustave Speth, author of The Bridge at the Edge of the World. You can begin submitting questions here.

The Bridge at the Edge of the World was reviewed in the Green section of the Washington Post. They said that Speth, who has "long been prominent in the environmental movement," gives "an extremely probing and thoughtful diagnosis of the root causes of planetary distress." Read the entire review here. Or read an excerpt from the book itself.

Speth's Bridge brings together diverse thinkers

Gus Speth, author of The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability, has been praised by a wide range of readers.

A Christian writer from Read the Spirit called Speth's ideas "a sign of hope." A philosopher of social science at ChangingSociety lauded Speth's "very powerful analysis," while comparing his ideas to those of the Dalai Lama. The writer at Kale for Sale wrote that Speth "is bursting at the seams with information and urgency." And Andrew Revkin on his DotEarth New York Times blog mentioned that The Bridge at the Edge of the World is on his reading table. And a review from the Yale Daily News noted that Speth's book makes "an argument supported from professionals from several different disciplines."

To hear what Speth himself has to say about his ideas, here's a video of Speth's April 22 appearance on OnPoint.

"During today's OnPoint, Speth, a former chair of the Council on Environmental Quality and founder of both the Natural Resources Defense Council and the World Resources Institute, explains why he is unhappy with the current state of environmentalism. He also gauges the changing level of interest in environmental issues on college campuses throughout the country."

View this video here while you still can--It will only be on the site for the next six months.

Click here to listen to an interview with Gus Speth on the Yale Press Podcast.

Yale University Press celebrates Earth Day

The Yale Press website now features a special page for Earth Day, with a selection of key environmental titles for individuals and for businesses. From recent publications like Gus Speth's The Bridge at the Edge of the World, to some of our bestsellers like Daniel C. Esty and Andrew S. Winston's Green to Gold, Yale University Press continues to publish groundbreaking work in the field of environmental studies. Click here for an extensive list of titles.

For more new and feature backlist titles in environmental history, conservation biology and the life sciences, please see our online Science catalog.

Speth brings together governors to fight climate change

U.S. Governors and top environmental officials will meet tomorrow here at Yale University to exchange ideas on how states and the federal government can combat global warming and develop a strategy for future action.

The gathering, organized in part by Yale Press author Gus Speth, will also celebrate the centennial of President Theodore Roosevelt’s landmark 1908 Conference of Governors, which launched the modern conservation movement, planted the seed for the National Parks System, and inspired significant state efforts to protect land.

Dean of the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and author of The Bridge at the Edge of the World, Speth collaborated with other Yale organizations and state officials to commemorate that landmark 1908 conference. Last night at 8pm, Speth introduced keynote speakers Theodore Roosevelt IV and Gifford Pinchot III, the descendants of the original organizers of that 1908 conference.

The author of Red Sky at Morning would be the first to agree that we are in deep environmental trouble, but he offers hope that there is still time to avert global catastrophe. Gus Speth explores a wide variety of promising and even radical ideas for transforming modern capitalism so as to protect and restore the natural world.

For more information on this conference, click here. To keep on top of more of Speth's events, visit the author's website Bridge At the Edge of the World.com.

Click here to listen to an interview with Gus Speth on the Yale Press Podcast.

Books on the beauty of nature and the nature of humanity

Two reviews of Yale Press titles appeared in the April 17th edition of the New York Review of Books.

Andrew Butterfield reviewed Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions, edited by Pierre Rosenberg and Keith Christiansen. Butterfield praises the "ravishingly beautiful exhibition, ... one that attempts to renew our understanding of the artist." He particularly admires the essay by Willibald Sauerländer, calling it "brilliant." Read the entire review here.

This beautiful catalogue presents the first in-depth examination of Poussin’s landscapes. Featured here are more than 40 paintings, ranging from the artist’s early Venetian-inspired pastorals to his grandly structured and austere works, designed as metaphors or allegories for the processes of nature. Also included are approximately 60 drawings and essays by internationally renowned scholars who examine the painter’s visual, literary, and philosophical influences as well as his relationships with his patrons and his place in the art-historical canon.

Heckscher's Creating Central Park discusses the creation of recreation

The New York Sun and the New York Observer, both running pieces on Creating Central Park by
Morrison H. Heckscher, have decided to emphasize different parts of the story: one real estate, the other art.

The Real Estate section of the New York Observer contained a Q&A with Heckscher about the book.  Heckscher begins, "I would like to start by saying that the whole issue of the park has to do with open space in Manhattan. Central Park is, shall we say, the conclusion of 50 years of political machinations of how to provide, for the city and Manhattan, open space mostly for health reasons—for air and space for the health of the public, and recreation." Read the entire interview here.

And the New York Sun ran a piece, "Creating Central Park," in their Arts section, with Heckscher discussing the great minds behind the creation of Central Park.

The year 2008 marks the 150th anniversary of the design of Central Park, the first and arguably the most famous of America’s urban landscape parks. In October 1857 the new park’s board of commissioners announced a public design competition, and the following April the imaginative yet practicable “Greensward” plan submitted by Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted was selected.

This book tells the fascinating story of how an extraordinary work of public art emerged from the crucible of New York City politics. From William Cullen Bryant’s 1844 editorial calling for “a pleasure ground of shade and recreation” to the completion of construction in 1870, the history of Central Park is an urban epic––a tale not only of animosity, political intrigue, and desire but also of idealism, sacrifice, and genius.

Yale Press Podcast, Episode 13

Episode 13 of the Yale Press Podcast is now available.
Download Episode 13

In Episode 13, Chris Gondek speaks with (1) Richard Sennett, winner of the 2006 Hegel Prize for lifetime achievement in the humanities and social sciences, about the art of craftsmanship; and (2) Gus Speth, dean of the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale, about how the free market system will need to adjust in the face of serious environmental changes.

Download it for free here, on iTunes, and everywhere else that podcasts can be found.

Comments are welcome.

In Episode 13, Chris Gondek speaks with (1) Richard Sennett, winner of the 2006 Hegel Prize for lifetime achievement in the humanities and social sciences, about the art of craftsmanship; and (2) Gus Speth, dean of the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale, about how the free market system will need to adjust in the face of serious environmental changes.

Download it for free here, on iTunes, and everywhere else that podcasts can be found.

Comments are welcome.

Colinvaux's Amazon Expeditions is a "scientific detective story"

Amazon Expeditions: My Quest for the Ice-Age Equator by Paul Colinvaux was recently reviewed in the Publishers Weekly Review Annex. They found the book to be "an exciting account of field work under challenging and sometimes dangerous circumstances. They went on to say that Amazon Expeditions is "a rewarding read for anyone with an interest in environmental and biological history."

In this vivid memoir of a life in science, ecologist Paul Colinvaux takes his readers from the Alaskan tundra to steamy Amazon jungles, from the Galapagos Islands (before tourists had arrived) to the high Andes and the Darien Gap in Panama. He recounts an adventurous tale of exploration in the days before GPS and satellite mapping, and a tale no less exhilarating of his battle to disprove a hypothesis endorsed by most of the scientific community.

Colinvaux’s grand endeavor, begun in the 1960s, was to find fossil evidence of the ice-age climate and vegetation of the entire American equator, from Pacific to Atlantic. The accomplishment of the task by the author and his colleagues involved finding unknown ancient lakes, lugging drilling equipment through uncharted Amazon jungle, operating hand drills from rubber boats in water 40 meters deep, and inventing a pollen analysis for a land with 80,000 species of plants. Colinvaux’s years of arduous travel and research ultimately disproved a hotly defended hypothesis explaining bird distribution peculiarities in the Amazon forest. The story of how he arrived at a new understanding of the Amazon is at once an adventurous saga, an account of science as it is conducted in the field, and a cautionary tale about the temptation to treat a favored hypothesis with a reverence that subverts unbiased research.

Yale Press books about unlikely neighbors and allies

In light of continued media coverage about the U.S.'s relationship with Iran, Trita Parsi's attention-grabbing Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States was reviewed by both Salon and Bloomberg News. Gary Kamiya of Salon calls it "an important new book," addressing a "fundamental misunderstanding of the country" of Iran. Celestine Bohlen of Bloomberg News admires the book for "tackling the complex question of Israel's role in what has become a triangular relationship" between Iran, the U.S., and Israel.

Read an excerpt, view the table of contents, or listen to an interview with the author on the Yale Press Podcast.

Slate and Seattle Times have recently praised In the Company of Crows and Ravens by John M. Marzluff and Tony Angell, released earlier this year in paperback.

This intriguing book examines the often surprising ways that crows and ravens and humans interact. Featuring more than 100 striking illustrations, the book recounts lively stories about crows and ravens throughout history and around the world, and the authors challenge us to reconsider our thinking not only about these compelling birds but also about ourselves.

Korobokin on Balkinization

Jack Balkin, the professor and author behind the popular blog Balkinization, invited Yale author Russell Korobkin to write a guest post and talk about his new book Stem Cell Century: Law and Policy for a Breakthrough Technology:

A couple of weeks back, Jack invited me to guest blog about my new book, Stem Cell Century: Law and Policy for a Breakthrough Technology, just out from Yale University Press. The book examines a broad range of legal and policy issues raised by stem cell research, starting with the issues that garner significant media attention, such as President Bush’s restrictive federal funding policy, but going substantially beyond to consider issues concerning cloning research, the patenting of stem cells, innovation policy as related to stem cells, issues of research subject protection and tissue donor compensation, and questions of regulation by the FDA and the tort system.

Korobkin's post, which continues here, has sparked a lot of discussion in the comments section. Read an excerpt from Stem Cell Century, or view the table of contents.

James Prosek in print and in studio

James Prosek, author and illustrator for Yale University Press' recently released Tight Lines: Ten Years of the Yale Anglers' Journal, wrote a short essay for the Outdoors section of the New York Times. The piece, published on November 28th, describes in painterly prose his trip to Alaska with an old mentor:

When I was 14, I was caught fishing illegally in a drinking-water reservoir by a game warden named Joe Haines. Instead of giving me a ticket, he took me under his wing.

I learned a lot of things from Haines: how to find edible mushrooms in the woods or four-leaf clovers in the yard; how to catch blue crabs and find razor clams; and how to spear, skin and cook eels.

To continue reading the piece, click here.

In addition, Prosek and Alexis Surovov came on WNPR's Where We Live to talk about fly fishing, the Yale Anglers' Journal, and Tight Lines. To listen to that show, click here.

Prosek also came into the studio for the Yale Press Podcast, which you can hear by clicking here.

James Prosek at the Peabody

From the Yale Peabody Museum's website:

Fly Fishing at the 41st Parallel

Realizing that he had happily fished his entire life only around his home of Easton, Connecticut, James Prosek decided to take a fishing trip around the world along the 41st parallel — that’s where trout thrive.

He headed east, traveling through southern Europe, the Balkans, Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia and Japan, and returning through the western United States, stopping frequently along the way to indulge his passion for fishing.

Come hear about this grand adventure and pick up a copy of the newly released Tight Lines: Ten Years of the Yale Anglers’ Journal, illustrated by Prosek.

Thursday, November 15 at 5pm. Yale Peabody Museum, 170 Whitney Ave & Sachem St., New Haven, CT

Listen to a Yale Press Podcast with James Prosek

Tight Lines, illustrated by James Prosek; Edited by Joseph Furia, Wyatt Golding, David Haltom, Steven Hayhurst, Joseph Kingsbery, and Alexis Surovov; With a Foreword by Nick Lyons; With a Preface by James Prosek and Joseph Furia

Since the first copy of the Yale Anglers’ Journal appeared in 1996, readers with an interest in fish and fishing have opened the pages of each issue with anticipation and delight. YAJ’s founders suspected that others would share their passion for literature and art...

John Firor remembered

John Firor, author of The Changing Atmosphere: A Global Challenge and The Crowded Greenhouse: Population, Climate Change, and Creating a Sustainable World, passed away last Monday. The environmental scholar and public-policy expert was, according to The New York Times, "an early voice linking climate change and human activity."

Richard Anthes, president of the University Corporation of Atmospheric Research, told The New York Times that, while Firor was director of the National Center of Atmospheric Research, "he called attention to the importance of human impact on the environment, when such a connection was still considered a fairly radical idea." An important thinker and a leader in the field, Firor had also been chairman of the board of Envrionmental Defense, and was a trustee and founding board member of the World Resources Institute.

Firor's first book, The Changing Atmosphere, was winner of the 1992 Louis J. Batten Author’s Award given by the American Meteorological Society. Firor, a widely known authority in atmospheric research, describes the causes of acid rain, ozone depletion, and global warming and the evidence for each one's recent acceleration, and he provides practical and long-range suggestions for controlling these and other forms of atmospheric deterioration.

The Crowded Greenhouse, Firor's second book, focuses on two critical global issues—rapid population growth and a human-induced climate change. Firor and Judith Jacobsen summarize the current status of these two issues, show how they are related to one another, and prescribe steps that governments, economies, societies, and individuals can adopt to stabilize both population and climate.

Read the entire New York Times article.

YUP authors on the airwaves

Ben Kiernan was interviewed by Lewis Lapham, former Harper's editor and now editor of Lapham's Quarterly. They discussed Kiernan's recently released Blood and Soil on Lapham's radio program "The World in Time," which aired this past Sunday, October 28. The interview is posted on Lewis Lapham's website at Lapham Quarterly, or can be heard here.

Ben Kiernan will also appear on Book TV later in November. If you missed Kiernan's recent discussion about his book at the Harvard Book Store in Cambridge, Massachusetts, or if you just want to hear him speak again, tune in on on Sunday, November 25, at 7:00 AM. For more information, click here.

Daniel Solove will be on KERA Dallas Public Radio's excellent hour-long program Think on November 5 at 1pm local time. Solove is the author of The Future of Reputation.This engrossing book explores the profound implications of personal information on the Internet, preserved forever even if it is false, biased, or humiliating. Brimming with examples of online gossip, slander, and rumor, the book discusses the tensions between privacy and free speech and proposes how to balance the two. What information about you is on the Internet?

Bernd Brunner will be appearing on NPR's The Diane Rehm Show on December 3. Brunner's Bears: A Brief History was released by Yale University Press earlier this month. Trita Parsi, author of Treacherous Alliance, was also guest on The Diane Rehm Show earlier this month to talk about his new book.

Brunner's engaging book examines the shared history of people and bears. Hopscotching through history, literature, and science, Bernd Brunner presents a delightfully illustrated compendium of information about different cultures’ attitudes toward bears, the central place of bears in our myths and dreams, how our images of bears do and do not mesh with reality, and more.

Congratulations Al Gore and IPCC on winning the Nobel Peace Prize

Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize earlier today for their efforts to increase awareness of climate change. (See a video of the announcement.)

We at Yale University Press want to congratulate them on their work and their achievement. For those who want to follow in Mr. Gore's footsteps, YUP offers an assortment of books in science and environmental topics.

In Red Sky at Morning: America and the Crisis of the Global Environment, renowned environmental leader James Gustave Speth warns that despite all the international negotiations of the past two decades, efforts to protect Earth’s environment are not succeeding. He explains why this is so and presents eight specific steps that governments and citizens can take to achieve a sustainable future.

Read an excerpt. View the table of contents.

Edited by Thomas E. Lovejoy and Lee Hannah, Climate Change and Biodiversity was selected by Choice Magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title for 2006. Leading researchers discuss what is now known about past climate changes in different areas of the world. They examine recent trends in and projections about climate change; ways that particular organisms are responding to climate change; conservation challenges, including social and policy issues; and more.

Read an excerpt. View the table of contents.

And keep an eye out for the upcoming book Environment: An Interdisciplinary Anthology, selected, edited, and with introductions by Glenn Adelson, James Engell, Brent Ranalli, and K. P. Van Anglen. This major, definitive anthology of writings is a complete and up-to-date guide to environmental literacy. The first to be organized around the idea that environmental studies must be interdisciplinary, the collection demonstrates how the natural sciences, social sciences, and the humanities all contribute to a balanced understanding of the natural world and our relationships to it. Watch for this title's release on December 31, 2007.

View the table of contents.

These are just the tip of the iceberg. See the rest of our science-related titles here.

Yale Press Podcast, Episode 9

Episode 9 of the Yale Press Podcast is now available.

In Episode 9, Chris Gondek speaks with (1) Trita Parsi about about his behind-the scenes revelations about events in the Middle East and the geopolitical competition between Israel, Iran, and the United Staes, and with (2) James Prosek, author, watercolorist, and musician about the Yale Anglers' Journal tenth anniversiary as well as its rise as one of world's premier literary journals devoted to the sport.

Download it for free here, on iTunes, and everywhere else that podcasts can be found.

Comments are welcome.

Show Notes for Episode 9 of the Yale Press Podcast

Posted by Chris Gondek, Producer/Host of the Yale Press Podcast.

I can't deny that my heartbeat quickened when I heard the theme music to the show again. I was putting together the main show, and when I put in the opening theme and started the fade, I felt very happy. Two months is far too long between shows. I go through withdrawl.

You'd be hard pressed to find a book that is as timely as Trita Parsi's Treacherous Alliance, a book that everyone who wants a sense of what is really going on between Israel and Iran should pick up and read. Then, once the adrenaline has subsided, the essays in Tight Lines are music to the ear of any angler. I know that I'll be picking up a copy to send to a college roommate of mine who is a devoted fly fisherman. When you look at all he has accomplished, James Prosek could very well be the coolest angler on the planet.

New York Times hears "many echoes for our own time" in Tim Jeal's Stanley

In a cover article for the New York Times Sunday Book Review, writer Paul Theroux reviews Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa's Greatest Explorer by Tim Jeal. Theroux writes that the famous--and infamous--Henry David Stanley "was probably the greatest explorer ever to set foot in Africa," and that Jeal's biography demonstrates this fact "in a way that makes it a superb adventure story as well as a feat of advocacy." The book progresses "like the most vivid sort of Victorian novel," while still being the "most felicitous, the best informed, the most complete and readable and exhaustive" of the many Stanley biographies out there. Theroux also emphasizes the "many modern dimensions of Jeal's book," saying that "Stanley's life speaks to our time, throwing light on the nannying ambitions that outsiders still wish upon Africa."

Read the entire review.

Henry Morton Stanley, so the tale goes, was a cruel imperialist who connived with King Leopold II of Belgium in horrific crimes against the people of the Congo. He also conducted the most legendary celebrity interview in history, opening with, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”

But these perceptions are not quite true, Tim Jeal shows in this grand and colorful biography. With unprecedented access to previously closed Stanley family archives, Jeal reveals the amazing extent to which Stanley’s public career and intimate life have been misunderstood and undervalued. Jeal recovers the reality of Stanley’s life—a life of almost impossible extremes—in this moving story of tragedy, adventure, disappointment, and success.

Marshes receiving a flood of reviews

William Burt's Marshes: The Disappearing Edens is receiving several nods in the media recently, with the most recent appearing in August's Science magazine. "Burt has been stalking shy inhabitants (especially rails, bitterns, grebes, and gallinules) of North America's grassy wetlands with his camera...He also reflects on the marshes he has explored, their riches, their pasts, and the threats they now face."

The Washington Post mentioned the book in an article about summer's flickering creatures: fireflies. "Nature photographer William Burt has communed with fireflies for years, but he knows that they can be hard to capture on film. Species that are dimmer, or don't blink for as long as others, he said, make for shy subjects. In his new book of wetland images, Burt takes readers to a great sedge marshland in Douglas, Manitoba, and an evening 14 summers ago when he captured hundreds of fireflies signaling to one another. Another force of nature, lightning, is dancing in the distant horizon."

In the July/August issue of Orion, Tim Traver calles Marshes, "entertaining and sobering at the same time...Books like this help put places like marshes back in the center of things."

The author recently appeared at a book signing during the opening of his exhibt at the Chesapeake Maritime Museum. Marshes: The Disappearing Edens, is published in conjuction with the exhibition and features over ninety of his most striking photographs and a narrative that invokes the marshes of the past and compares them to today’s, with prose as picture-sharp as the photography.

Click here for additional reviews of Marshes.

Show Notes for Episode 3, Yale Press Podcast

Posted by Chris Gondek, Producer/Host of the Yale Press Podcast

The famous baseball manager, Casey Stengell, once said that "There comes a time in every man's life, and I've had plenty of them." I had one of those moments during my interview with John Marzluff and Tony Angell, when Tony decided to cut loose with both a Raven and Crow call. I knew right then that I was going to have something fun for the opening segment.

As usual, the guest list was a very cool mixed bag. I thought that Sidney Kirkpatrick's statement on how his step-daughter's illness was the inspiration to write about Thomas Eakins was a nice moment. I now hope that Dr. Gerald Edelman, or someone else, might look more into the intersection of brain science and Eastern philosophy, which we got into just a bit on his extended interview. And I thought that all of the Gombrich family stories that Leonie Gombrich told were great. I now have both A Little History of the World and The Story of Art side by side on my bookshelf.

Please send me comments and questions. The Ask the Author segment has been running dry, and if I don't start getting some e-mails, I'll have to make up some of my own ;)

Stay warm,

Chris

It's a Jungle Up There

For tropical ecologist Meg Lowman, Rock-a-bye, baby, in the treetop, was much more than a lullaby. It was life.

As a single mother drawn to the mysteries of tropical rain forests and fascinated by life in the treetops, Meg Lowman has pursued a life of scientific exploration while raising her two sons, Edward and James Burgess. This often meant taking her kids to work in remote parts of the world, from Samoa and West West Africa to Panama and Peru. It's a Jungle Up There: More Tales from the Treetops, written by Lowman in collaboration with her two sons, recounts their family adventures from the perspectives of both kids and parent. The sequel to Lowman's acclaimed Life in the Treetops, the book is an inspiring portrayal of how a parent's career can imprint children and how children can in turn influence the success and trajectory of their parent's career.

Lowman and her son James were recently interviewed on NPR's Living on Earth with Steve Curwood.

Curwood: Now, you've lived in rainforest canopies all over the world, right?

Lowman: That's correct. I suppose as a young mom my biggest dilemma was, Should I leave the kids at the bottom of the tree with all the poisonous snakes, or take them into the canopy, which seemed a little dangerous? But they did like to climb, so we went from Australia to Panama and Peru, and they did in the end become my best research assistants ever.

Curwood: Now what's the advantage for a plant biologist and entomologist--that is, someone who studies insects--to take two young boys with her into the rainforest?

Lowman: Most of my colleagues would probably tell me there's no advantage to having children in the forest. In fact, they would look askance when I explained to them what I was doing sometimes. But in the end there were lots of great advantages, and that's partly why I wrote about it.
For one, having a family in other countries and other cultures is a really wonderful, precious communication mode. And I did find in most other cultures they value family so highly that they were always full of trust and enthusiasm and kindness when they knew that I had brought my kids along. And secondly, the boys really do have better senses than us older people, so they could see things and hear things, and it provided me, essentially, with three man-hours of work for every one woman-hour out in the field. So in a funny way I probably got to see and measure more things than perhaps some of my counterparts.

Curwood: Now, James, what's it like growing up with a scientist mom?

James: Well, it has some pros and cons, I guess. It was really great, you know, to be able to go to these exotic places and come back with exciting stories to tell all our friends...We had some interesting experiences. Just to be around dozens and dozens of other scientists all excitedly discussing the newest variety of mite that lives under someone's armpit or something.

Read a review of the book in this past weekend's Miami Herald.

A Global Warning

In a piece that aired on this weekend's edition of 60 Minutes, a panel of experts issued a "global warning" about the warming of the planet. New data shows that "the seas are rising, hurricanes will be more powerful, like Katrina, and polar bears may be headed toward extinction," and that all this is the direct result of human activity, especially the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

One scientist interviewed on the program, Paul Mayewski from the University of Maine, has found in ice cores drilled from glaciers higher levels of carbon dioxide now than have been seen "in hundreds of thousands of years, if not millions of years." All this, he says, "points to something that has changed and something that has impacted the system which wasn't doing it more than 100 years ago. And we know exactly what it is. It's human activity."

Obviously, despite all the international negotiations of the past two decades, efforts to protect the earth's environment are not succeeding, says James Gustave Speth in his book, Red Sky at Morning. In the book Speth, who served as adviser on environmental issues to Presidents Carter and Clinton, and was recently awarded the Blue Planet Prize for his role in bringing the global warming issue to wide public attention, explains why current approaches to critical global environmental problems don't work. Still, he argues, the challenges are not insurmountable, and he offers eight comprehensive, viable new strategies for dealing with environmental threats around the world.

"To Know the Crow Is to Know Ourselves"

"If asked the animal with which we share the most in common, we might be forgiven for naming one of the great apes," writes Joanna Dally in the latest issue of Science Magazine. "But John Marzluff and Tony Angell beg to differ. Fervent enthusiasts of all things corvid, they argue that 'to know the crow is to know ourselves.'

"Their In the Company of Crows and Ravens offers a general audience intriguing and inspiring insights into the dynamic relationship that has long persisted between corvids and humans. Using a rich tapestry of folklore and science, Marzluff and Angell provide a comprehensive account of the impact of crows on human culture throughout the ages.

                                              * * *

"The great strength of In the Company of Crows and Ravens lies in the obvious and inescapable passion that Marzluff and Angell have for corvids. One cannot help but be carried away by the authors' enthusiastic and engaging style. Their prose is supplemented by Angell's wonderful drawings and scratchboard illustrations.

"The authors state that one of their aims was to encourage people to watch and wonder at crows, and here they have been extremely successful. Indeed, if asked again with which animal we humans have the most in common, readers of the book might well be tempted to choose one of these remarkable birds."