Extreme Scientists: Exploring
Nature’s Mysteries from Perilous Places. By Donna M. Jackson. Houghton
Mifflin Harcourt. $9.99.
The Mincing Mockingbird Guide to
Troubled Birds. By Matt Adrian. Blue Rider Press. $15.95.
The image of scientists
wearing white coats and spending their days doing minutiae in laboratories
filled with glassware and microscopes is given the lie, again and again, by the
excellent “Scientists in the Field” series, which in Extreme Scientists shows just how wrong the clichéd notion of
science can be. Originally published in 2009 and now available in paperback,
Donna M. Jackson’s book focuses on three scientists whose work is very much
outdoors and very definitely risky by most people’s standards. Paul Flaherty is
a hurricane tracker; Hazel Barton searches for microbes that live deep within
caves; and Stephen Sillett studies life high in the sky by climbing redwoods in
the United States and scaling giant Australian eucalyptus trees. Flaherty is a
meteorologist who flies aboard planes that go into hurricanes to measure the
storms and learn enough about them to make understanding and predicting their
paths easier. His matter-of-fact descriptions of the three types of radar the
plane carries, and of the fact that wind shear is more dangerous than wind
speed, are accompanied by his comments that “the rewards of hurricane hunting
far outweigh the risks” – a sentiment that Flaherty shares with field
scientists in general. Barton, who has explored ice caves in Greenland and
underwater caves in Mexico, is a discoverer of multiple new microbial species and
would surely agree that the substantial risks she takes are worthwhile. And
there are certainly plenty of them: among the photos showing her rappelling and
wading through water is one in which her arm is in a sling, the result of a
boulder breaking loose in a New Zealand cave. “After surgery and thirty-seven
stitches, Hazel soon returned to caving,” writes Jackson. As for Sillett, the
photos of him and other scientists climbing enormous trees are dizzying, and so
is his story of almost dying in a fall from a giant redwood when his line
passed over a broken branch that he had no way to see from below. What is
amazing about all these scientists is how devoted they clearly are to their
work and how little they consider themselves risk-takers – although they are
acutely aware of the risks of their work. Yes, there are straightforward
laboratory elements to these scientists’ work – Barton, for example, grows cave
microbes in a traditional-looking lab so she can study them as their colonies
expand. But anyone looking for excitement in the real world will find plenty of
it here, all in the service of advancing the scientific understanding of our
planet and, perhaps, others as well: discoveries in Earth caves can help
indicate the likelihood of the existence of some sort of life on Mars.
Thank goodness scientists do
not need to investigate the denizens
described in The Mincing Mockingbird
Guide to Troubled Birds. This is a strange little 64-page book that looks
like a gift book but that it is doubtful most people would want to give (or
receive) as a gift. It is laid out like a library book that has been pulled
permanently from the shelves, with a trompe
l’oeil front-inside-cover pocket for a circulation card and the word
“discard” looking as if it has been stamped near the title; the word
“withdrawn” looks as if it is stamped on the inside back cover. The brainchild,
if that is the right word, of Matt Adrian, the book contains drawings of
various birds in various close-up poses, saying various things (or having
various things said about them) that almost make sense, but not quite. “He had
a violent, uncontrolled temper, which sent him literally insane when he was
annoyed, but he was good-looking.” “‘This is wonderful!’ ‘This is going to be
fine!’ ‘I love this!’ I was soon to change my mind, however.” “The ability to
remain sober and gracious is, indeed, a form of mild insanity.” A few pages
have headlines that are then followed by short paragraphs; among the headlines
are “Baby, Not This Again,” “Chicken Cannot Abide Flinchers,” and “This Is a
Bird Feeder, Not a Chinese Buffet.” The last page of the book is called “Bird
Attack Statistics 1974” and also includes four decidedly odd “Study Questions,”
the second of which, for example, is, “What species of bird makes its nest in
the body cavity of a dead bird?” The humor of the book may be clear to some,
for whom it will have a (+++) rating, but it will be obscure or simply missing
for others, for whom it will be a (++) book. And that, as part of one page’s
headline notes, “is being mighty generous.”
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