Skip to main content

The Sloth Lemur's Song - Alison Richard ***

Despite the title, this is not a book about the sloth lemur's song (as Alison Richard admits, we don't even know if this extinct animal did sing), but rather a combination of a story of a personal love for Madagascar with a chronological trip through Madagascar's geological and biological history and prehistory.

What shines through here is Richard's deep passion for Madagascar and the book really comes alive when she relates personal experiences. Notable, for example, was the description of a walk involving passing through a location crammed with leeches. We are told that 'By the thousand, they looked like a waving lawn' and a colleague 'pulled 80 leeches off one leg and then stopped counting'. 

There is lots of good stuff in here, but some parts of the content, notably when dealing with areas outside Richard's own field (for example geology and the history of grasses) didn't truly engage the reader. I also found the structure haphazard - I'm not sure the format of following this huge island (significantly bigger than France, which surprised me) through the millennia was really the best way to approach Richard's enthusiasm for its wildlife and lemurs in particular.

There were a few other issues. Richard has, perhaps, an exaggerated idea of other people's interest in and knowledge of Madagascar over and above the animated films of that name - she comments 'Madagascar lives in the public’s imagination as, at once a treasure of nature and an environmental disaster’ - nope, most know very little about it. I also got quite confused because Richard, apparently randomly, refers to animals by their English, Latin and Malagasy names - so, for instance, I had to plough back through the book to remind myself that a sifaka was a white lemur.

One of the inevitable themes here is environmentalism and climate change. It's really refreshing that with her in-depth knowledge, Richard can show how things are far more complex than the conventional narrative of thoughtless local people destroying the natural environment as they cut down forest. On the other hand, I think she could have said more about the uncomfortable tension that arises from academics spending their life flying around the world to conferences and work sites while simultaneously warning of the dangers of climate change - it's worth at least thinking if all such research should be undertaken by locals who don't need to fly to do it.

Overall, definitely an interesting book (I'm with the majority knowing very little about Madagascar before reading it), but it could have done with better structuring and a more interesting balance of content.

Hardback: 
Bookshop.org

  

Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

David Spiegelhalter Five Way interview

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter FRS OBE is Emeritus Professor of Statistics in the Centre for Mathematical Sciences at the University of Cambridge. He was previously Chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication and has presented the BBC4 documentaries Tails you Win: the Science of Chance, the award-winning Climate Change by Numbers. His bestselling book, The Art of Statistics , was published in March 2019. He was knighted in 2014 for services to medical statistics, was President of the Royal Statistical Society (2017-2018), and became a Non-Executive Director of the UK Statistics Authority in 2020. His latest book is The Art of Uncertainty . Why probability? because I have been fascinated by the idea of probability, and what it might be, for over 50 years. Why is the ‘P’ word missing from the title? That's a good question.  Partly so as not to make it sound like a technical book, but also because I did not want to give the impression that it was yet another book
Post a Comment
Read more

The Genetic Book of the Dead: Richard Dawkins ****

When someone came up with the title for this book they were probably thinking deep cultural echoes - I suspect I'm not the only Robert Rankin fan in whom it raised a smile instead, thinking of The Suburban Book of the Dead . That aside, this is a glossy and engaging book showing how physical makeup (phenotype), behaviour and more tell us about the past, with the messenger being (inevitably, this being Richard Dawkins) the genes. Worthy of comment straight away are the illustrations - this is one of the best illustrated science books I've ever come across. Generally illustrations are either an afterthought, or the book is heavily illustrated and the text is really just an accompaniment to the pictures. Here the full colour images tie in directly to the text. They are not asides, but are 'read' with the text by placing them strategically so the picture is directly with the text that refers to it. Many are photographs, though some are effective paintings by Jana Lenzová. T
Post a Comment
Read more

Everything is Predictable - Tom Chivers *****

There's a stereotype of computer users: Mac users are creative and cool, while PC users are businesslike and unimaginative. Less well-known is that the world of statistics has an equivalent division. Bayesians are the Mac users of the stats world, where frequentists are the PC people. This book sets out to show why Bayesians are not just cool, but also mostly right. Tom Chivers does an excellent job of giving us some historical background, then dives into two key aspects of the use of statistics. These are in science, where the standard approach is frequentist and Bayes only creeps into a few specific applications, such as the accuracy of medical tests, and in decision theory where Bayes is dominant. If this all sounds very dry and unexciting, it's quite the reverse. I admit, I love probability and statistics, and I am something of a closet Bayesian*), but Chivers' light and entertaining style means that what could have been the mathematical equivalent of debating angels on
Post a Comment
Read more