The Meadowlands – Robert Sullivan ****

We need to start of straight away with why this book is here at all, because it’s pretty borderline as popular science. Okay, the simplistic answer is because the publisher sent a review copy and we liked it – but it’s a little more than that. Meadowlands is in the same genre as Bill Bryson’s travel books – a personal account of experiences in a particular place or set of places, and though these books tend to get lumped under the travel category, they are just as much personal explorations of natural history, a crossover that was proved in Bryson’s science title. Robert Sullivan’s book is about exploring what most would consider a semi-industrial wasteland, the wilderness of tips, marshes and industrial waste on the outskirts of New York, and in doing so, the book comes across unclassifiably as a mix of industrial archaeology, travel, sociology and natural history – so it belongs here as much as it belongs anywhere else.

Perhaps the biggest attraction of this book is Sullivan’s obvious love for something very few could find attractive. It’s the attraction of the eccentric. The Meadowlands with its tips and foul waste is not the sort of place most people would want to spend a vacation in, yet time and time again Sullivan is enticed back to explore different parts of this strange nowhere land. And yet occasionally you can see why it’s so attractive. Here he is, in sight of Manhattan’s skyscrapers, yet he is in a place of wild marshes and wildlife (even if it’s also a place of pollution and wildfires).

This isn’t a book to read with the expectation of discovering new scientific facts, but it is one that will bring a smile to your face, fascinate and surprise – all in a gentle way. Sometimes Sullivan’s efforts seem a little odd – perhaps most notably his search for the remains of the original Penn Station, dumped in the Meadowlands when it was demolished – but they will never be less than interesting. If you like the look of this book it’s also worth checking out Sullivan’s Rats which is in a similar vein, but has more scientific content.

Paperback:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

The Infinite Alphabet - Cesar Hidalgo ****

Although taking a very new approach, this book by a physicist working in economics made me nostalgic for the business books of the 1980s. More on why in a moment, but Cesar Hidalgo sets out to explain how it is knowledge - how it is developed, how it is managed and forgotten - that makes the difference between success and failure. When I worked for a corporate in the 1980s I was very taken with Tom Peters' business books such of In Search of Excellence (with Robert Waterman), which described what made it possible for some companies to thrive and become huge while others failed. (It's interesting to look back to see a balance amongst the companies Peters thought were excellent, with successes such as Walmart and Intel, and failures such as Wang and Kodak.) In a similar way, Hidalgo uses case studies of successes and failures for both businesses and countries in making effective use of knowledge to drive economic success. When I read a Tom Peters book I was inspired and fired up...

God: the Science, the Evidence - Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies ***

This is, to say the least, an oddity, but a fascinating one. A translation of a French bestseller, it aims to put forward an examination of the scientific evidence for the existence of a deity… and various other things, as this is a very oddly structured book (more on that in a moment). In The God Delusion , Richard Dawkins suggested that we should treat the existence of God as a scientific claim, which is exactly what the authors do reasonably well in the main part of the book. They argue that three pieces of scientific evidence in particular are supportive of the existence of a (generic) creator of the universe. These are that the universe had a beginning, the fine tuning of natural constants and the unlikeliness of life. To support their evidence, Bolloré and Bonnassies give a reasonable introduction to thermodynamics and cosmology. They suggest that the expected heat death of the universe implies a beginning (for good thermodynamic reasons), and rightly give the impression tha...

The War on Science - Lawrence Krauss (Ed.) ****

At first glance this might appear to be yet another book on how to deal with climate change deniers and the like, such as How to Talk to a Science Denier. It is, however, a much more significant book because it addresses the way that universities, government and pressure groups have attempted to undermine the scientific process. Conceptually I would give it five stars, but it's quite heavy going because it's a collection of around 18 essays by different academics, with many going over the same ground, so there is a lot of repetition. Even so, it's an important book. There are a few well-known names here - editor Lawrence Krauss, Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker - but also a range of scientists (with a few philosophers) explaining how science is being damaged in academia by unscientific ideas. Many of the issues apply to other disciplines as well, but this is specifically about the impact on science, and particularly important there because of the damage it has been doing...

Search This Blog