The year's best science books

This year was another bumper year for top-notch books about science. Here's a smattering of those that won shelf space at my home.

Canada Rocks: The Geologic Journey

By Nick Eyles and Andrew Miall

Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 450 pages

Canada does not simply have, as Sir John A. Macdonald once noted, too much geography. As this book convincingly demonstrates, it also has a lot of fascinating geology.

Every page of the volume sparkles with information and entertainment. An article about the country's most famous building stone, Tyndall limestone, is illustrated with a photograph of Queen Elizabeth II in a frock that blends into a Tyndall-faced wall at the Manitoba legislature building.

Just reading the captions in this profusely illustrated volume provides an education in the geological forces that have shaped our land for four billion years. In addition to stunning, double-page panoramas of the "knob and lochan" landscape of Newfoundland's Lewis Hills, the photographs also include the traditional geologist's standbys to indicate relative size – camera lens caps, rock hammers, and long-suffering spouses.

Two apparent omissions, one likely an oversight and the other probably intentional: With wine regions proliferating across the country, a discussion of the contribution of soil and rock to wine's character ("terroir") would have been welcome. As well, the authors credit the long history of pivotal research by the Geological Survey of Canada but don't point out that the GSC is but a shadow of its former self, thanks to budget slashing and government myopia.

Two related works worth considering are Michael Collier's Over The Mountains (Firefly, 128 pages), a large-format collection of stunning aerial photographs, and Ted Nield's Supercontinent (Raincoast, 288 pages), an accessible account of how the Earth has several times consisted of a single island landmass and will again, in about 250 million years.

Silence of the Songbirds: How We Are Losing the World's Songbirds and What We Can Do to Save Them

By Bridget Stutchbury

HarperCollins, 256 pages

A Star story about York biology professor Bridget Stutchbury sparked the commissioning of this book. Anyone whose day has been brightened by a bird's song should be grateful for this serendipity.

Writing with both passion and care for accuracy, Stutchbury traces the precipitous decline in the numbers of the songbirds that migrate between the forests of eastern North America and their southern refuges from our winters. Surveys in North America have charted a relentless loss of around one per cent a year in the population of bobolinks, eastern kingbird, Kentucky Warbler, and wood thrush.

The book includes a checklist of actions to help slow the decline but sidesteps the most important cause: rampant population growth that annihilates bird habitat.

Two more books about birds worth considering are Richard Cannings' closely observed essays on avian life in An Enchantment of Birds (Greystone, 211 pages) and Owls of the United States and Canada (UBC Press, 242 pages) with evocative words and photos by Wayne Lynch.

Ebb and Flow: Tides and Life on Our Once and Future Planet

By Tom Koppel

Dundurn, 296 pages

This wonderful resource book is nearly ruined by the penny-pinching publishing mentality that omitted an index. Fortunately, the author's admirable chapter organization is a considerable help in finding specific references.

Tom Koppel seems to have visited or read about every place with unusual tides and water currents, yet he wears this scholarship lightly.

The body count is high, with whole ships sucked down into the Norwegian Maelstrom or the Corryvreckan Whirlpool near Jura in the Hebrides, which almost claimed George Orwell.

Deceptive in its languidness, a rising tide doomed a score of unwary cockle harvesters in northwest England in 2004 and – as Koppel chillingly recounts – almost snatched a New Brunswick geologist who was an expert on the Bay of Fundy tides.

An added extra is a post-script recipe for pasta con vongole, but you'll have to travel to Salt Spring Island, where the author digs the little neck clams on "his" beach.

Deadly Companions: How Microbes Shaped Our History

By Dorothy H. Crawford

Oxford University Press, 250 pages

In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1945, Alexander Fleming predicted that microbes would evolve to be resistant to antibiotics such as penicillin. Hardly anyone listened. Thanks to reckless misuse, people are dying of antibiotic-resistant strains of diseases that were handily defeated only a decade ago, such as tuberculosis and staphylococcus aureus.

A professor of medical microbiology at the University of Edinburgh, Dorothy Crawford has written a balanced and sensible volume about the way in which bacteria, viruses and protozoa have shaped human existence. Her tale starts with the 2003 SARS outbreak, the first pandemic of the 21st century. People died from the disease in Canada because the Chinese first hushed up the outbreak and then didn't quickly share their containment methods.

Crawford's message is that microbes do not respect national boundaries, and only a higher level of global co-operation offers any protection against a repeat of the devastation wrecked by flu in 1918.

Elephants on Acid and Other Bizarre Experiments

By Alex Boese

Harcourt, 290 pages

How to Build a Robot Army

By Daniel H. Wilson

Raincoast, 176 pages

Let's call this the Science Lite category. By combing the byways of the scientific literature, Alex Boese has assembled a mind-boggling catalogue of just how far afield curiosity has lured some researchers. For example, an attractive young woman is twice as likely to be phoned by men she chats up on Vancouver's swaying Capilano Suspension Bridge than by those she encounters in a park. It's all due to a concept called "misattribution of arousal," say the researchers who carried out the experiment.

Daniel H. Wilson has a degree in robotics from a well-regarded U.S. university, where he obviously also picked up insight into smart marketing. Two years ago, he produced How to Survive a Robot Uprising. Now he's back with only slightly tongue-in-cheek advice about using robots to vanquish vampires, zombies, werewolves, a great white shark, and a rogue asteroid. You'd hardly credit how simple it is to convert a high-tech vacuum cleaner into a deadly killing machine: duct tape a steak knife to the front.

Being Caribou: Five Months on Foot with an Arctic Herd

By Karsten Heuer

McClelland & Stewart, 235 pages

Just before wildlife biologist Karsten Heuer set off to follow the annual migration of the Porcupine Caribou herd to the Arctic coast, an elder in the Yukon settlement of Old Crow told him about times past when people could talk to caribou and caribou could talk to people.

Five months and around 1,500 kilometres later, Heuer and fiancée Leanne Allison had indeed talked with caribou. They had trekked with the 120,000 strong herd to the calving grounds that straddle the Yukon-Alaska border; been stalked by grizzly bears keeping pace with the herd; watched from only metres away as the animals gave birth lying on the tundra; and gently handled corpses of a few of the quarter of the calves who would perish from predators and the elements.

The continued existence of the herd making this centuries-old trek is imperilled by U.S. plans to exploit the petroleum reserves beneath the calving grounds. It might produce enough oil to fuel American SUVs and other gas-guzzlers for one year.

Allison made an award-winning documentary film about their experience, and Heuer captured it in this outstanding Canadian science book that I somehow missed when it was issued in hardcover in 2006.

Two other serious books deserve a mention. From Oliver Sacks comes another delightful romp through the human brain, Musicophilia (Alfred A. Knopf, 380 pages); and, from New York Times science writer Natalie Angier, The Canon, which the subtitle accurately describes as A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science (Thomas Allen, 292 pages).

Understanding Popular Science

By Peter Broks

McGraw-Hill, 182 pages

Canadians have recently experienced the spectacle of a prime minister and two cabinet ministers pronouncing on the safety of a nuclear research reactor, even though none of them could distinguish the kinds of ionizing radiation – alpha, beta or gamma – without crib notes from their officials.

So how is scientific thinking supposed to enhance democratic culture when hardly anyone can think scientifically?

Peter Broks, a lecturer at Britain's Open University, tackles such questions in this insightful look at the fraught relationship between science and society.


http://www.thestar.com/News/article/289550