Skip to main content

Ladders to Heaven - Mike Shanahan ****


There are two ways to title a book - either say what it actually is (the 'does what it says on the tin' approach), or have a nice but totally uninformative title, but give away what it's really about in the subtitle. Mike Shanahan opts for the second approach in this handsome hardback, produced by the Unbound book crowdfunding site. Without knowing it's 'How fig trees shaped our history, fed our imaginations and can enrich our future,' you would be pretty lost. (The US title of 'Gods, Wasps and Stranglers' may leave you even more baffled.)
Shaping history, feeding imaginations and enriching the future are dramatic claims, which seem rather remote if you grew up in those parts of Western Europe where figs are things that come in little boxes and you can go your whole life without seeing a fig tree - but Shanahan makes a compelling case for the significance of the fig and the fig tree in at least the first two of those topics.
There are some genuinely fascinating parts to the book, but sometimes, particularly in the first half, there's a danger of Shanahan becoming a fig tree bore. Doing this kind of crossover book, hovering somewhere science writing and nature writing (which is generally a far more arty, fluffy affair with little or no science involved), is a delicate balance. The Fly Trap does this superbly - in Ladders to Heaven, the approach works most of the time, though occasionally it feels all too much like a sequel to Eat, Pray, Love (though for a nature book, perhaps Eat Prey Live might be more apt).

There is too much myth and mysticism to begin with, but when, for instance, Shanahan tells the story of Corner's botanical monkeys, trained to retrieve figs from the heights of trees, although the writing style is a touch breathless, the storytelling is very effective.

What comes across powerfully is just what amazing organisms fig trees are. I find it difficult to get into the mindset of a botanist, but if you have to study plants, surely these remarkable trees make a case for themselves. Not only do some species encase other trees, which eventually rot away to leave the skeletal fig, and not only do they include that most remarkable tree the banyan among their kind, figs themselves are unique. We're all familiar with the final fruit phase of the fig, but in its early stage it is not a fruit, but a casing for its flowers, which emerge inside the case and can only be fertilised thanks to a symbiotic relationship with a wasp. That's living on the botanical edge, for sure.

So, unlikely though it may seem, reading this book you will discover that 'all you ever wanted to know about figs and fig trees' is not something you find on the back of a matchbox, but makes for a genuinely interesting story. It's not a long book - I read it on a 3 hour train journey - but if you're like me, you will feel you that it was 3 hours well spent. I've never been fond of figs to eat, but I now count myself as an honorary fan of the fig and its trees.
Hardback:  

Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Antigravity Enigma - Andrew May ****

Antigravity - the ability to overcome the pull of gravity - has been a fantasy for thousands of years and subject to more scientific (if impractical) fictional representation since H. G. Wells came up with cavorite in The First Men in the Moon . But is it plausible scientifically?  Andrew May does a good job of pulling together three ways of looking at our love affair with antigravity (and the related concept of cancelling inertia) - in science fiction, in physics and in pseudoscience and crankery. As May points out, science fiction is an important starting point as the concept was deployed there well before we had a good enough understanding of gravity to make any sensible scientific stabs at the idea (even though, for instance, Michael Faraday did unsuccessfully experiment with a possible interaction between gravity and electromagnetism). We then get onto the science itself, noting the potential impact on any ideas of antigravity that come from the move from a Newtonian view of a...
Post a Comment
Read more

The World as We Know It - Peter Dear ***

History professor Peter Dear gives us a detailed and reasoned coverage of the development of science as a concept from its origins as natural philosophy, covering the years from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. inclusive If that sounds a little dry, frankly, it is. But if you don't mind a very academic approach, it is certainly interesting. Obviously a major theme running through is the move from largely gentleman natural philosophers (with both implications of that word 'gentleman') to professional academic scientists. What started with clubs for relatively well off men with an interest, when universities did not stray far beyond what was included in mathematics (astronomy, for instance), would become a very different beast. The main scientific subjects that Dear covers are physics and biology - we get, for instance, a lot on the gradual move away from a purely mechanical views of physics - the reason Newton's 'action at a distance' gravity caused such ...
Post a Comment
Read more

It's On You - Nick Chater and George Loewenstein *****

Going on the cover you might think this was a political polemic - and admittedly there's an element of that - but the reason it's so good is quite different. It shows how behavioural economics and social psychology have led us astray by putting the focus way too much on individuals. A particular target is the concept of nudges which (as described in Brainjacking ) have been hugely over-rated. But overall the key problem ties to another psychological concept: framing. Huge kudos to both Nick Chater and George Loewenstein - a behavioural scientist and an economics and psychology professor - for having the guts to take on the flaws in their own earlier work and that of colleagues, because they make clear just how limited and potentially dangerous is the belief that individuals changing their behaviour can solve large-scale problems. The main thesis of the book is that there are two ways to approach the major problems we face - an 'i-frame' where we focus on the individual ...
Post a Comment
Read more