Skip to main content

Mariposa Road – Robert Michael Pyle ***

If there is one quotation all physicists love more than any other it is Rutherford’s magnificent put down ‘All science is either physics or stamp collecting.’ And frankly, when it comes to science, Mariposa Road sits firmly in the stamp collecting class. To be fair, Rutherford’s remark was not quite as negative as it seems – ‘stamp collecting’ in the sense of collecting and collating information as is typical of natural history is an essential part of science – but to make for something to get your teeth into it helps to have the other bits too.
The trouble, then with this book, which according to the subtitle is ‘the first butterfly big year’ (if that is as meaningless to you as it is to me, I think the idea is that it is the account of year spent trying to spot as many different butterflies as possible within the United States), is that unless you are deeply interested in butterflies (and I am afraid I only have a passing interest), the excitement palls after about the fifth species. Don’t get me wrong. There is really interesting science in butterflies – just read the excellent book Metamorphosis – but not in cataloguing butterflies someone else has seen.
You might wonder why I bothered at all. It’s because I love the right kind of personal travel narrative. Pretty well any of Bill Bryson’s travel books, for instance (all better than his popular science book, for all its sales), or even something more quirky like Stuart Maconie’s Pies and Prejudice. But sadly not the approach taken by Robert Pyle. It’s not bad, but it is simply too gentle, too much a personal journal than an entertaining narrative. I just wasn’t that interested, I’m afraid.
Not one for me then. If you love butterflies, you may find it makes all the difference… but otherwise a less than exciting read.

Paperback 
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Language of Mathematics - Raúl Rojas ***

One of the biggest developments in the history of maths was moving from describing relationships and functions with words to using symbols. This interesting little book traces the origins of a whole range of symbols from those familiar to all, to the more obscure squiggles used in logic and elsewhere. On the whole Raúl Rojas does a good job of filling in some historical detail, if in what is generally a fairly dry fashion. We get to trace what was often a bumpy path as different symbols were employed (particularly, for example, for division and multiplication, where several still remain in use), but usually, gradually, standards were adopted. This feels better as a reference, to dip into if you want to find out about a specific symbol, rather than an interesting end to end read. Rojas tells us the sections are designed to be read in any order, which means that there is some overlap of text - it feels more like a collection of short essays or blog posts that he couldn't be bothered ...

Target Earth – Govert Schilling *****

I was biased in favour of this great little book even before I started to read it, simply because it’s so short. I’m sure that a lot of people who buy popular science books just want an overview and taster of a subject that’s brand new to them – and that’s likely to work best if the author keeps it short and to the point. Of course, you may want to dig deeper in areas that really interest you, but that’s what Google is for. That basic principle aside, I’m still in awe at how much substance Govert Schilling has managed to cram into this tiny book. It’s essentially about all the things (natural things, I mean, not UFOs or space junk) that can end up on Earth after coming down from outer space. That ranges from the microscopically small particles of cosmic dust that accumulate in our gutters, all the way up to the ten kilometre wide asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. Between these extremes are two topics that we’ve reviewed entire books about recently: meteorites ( The Meteorite Hunt...

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...