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

Luna: Moon Rising (SF) - Ian McDonald ****

I'm not the natural audience for this book. Game of Thrones l eaves me cold - and it's hard not to feel the influence of GoT (and a whole lot of Dune )   underneath a veneer of science fiction and the trappings of a South American drug cartel in the cod-medieval family power battles and chivalric details. There are even dragons (of a sort). I'd be really sad if the future did involve this sort of throwback feudalism. However, remarkably, despite this I found Luna: Moon Rising kept me engaged. The fact is that Ian McDonald can put together a good plot with intricate machinations, which is enough to carry the reader through what can be a bewildering collection of characters. The two page scene-setter saying who did what to whom at the start was useful, but I could have done with family trees for the main family as I was constantly forgetting who was who - especially easy as McDonald endows many families with characters with the same first initial (e.g. Ariel and Al...
Post a Comment
Read more

Adventures of a Computational Explorer - Stephen Wolfram ***

Stephen Wolfram, the man behind the scientist's mathematical tool of choice, Mathematica, plus a whole host of other software products, including the uncanny Wolfram Alpha knowledge engine, is undoubtedly a genius of the first order. In this book, we get an uncensored excursion into the mind of genius - which is, without doubt, a fascinating prospect. The book consists of a collection of essays and speeches that Wolfram has produced over the last ten to fifteen years, covering an eclectic range of topics. Like all such collections, the result is something that lacks the coherence of a book with a narrative that runs through it, inevitably introducing a degree of repetition and a mix of interesting and not-so-interesting topics - but there's likely to be something to catch the attention anyone who is into computing or mathematics. One of the most interesting pieces is the opening one, where Wolfram describes being a consultant on the SF movie Arrival. He seems to hav...
Post a Comment
Read more

E=mc2: A biography of the world’s most famous equation – David Bodanis *****

David Bodanis is a storyteller, and he fulfils this role with flair in E=mc2. The premise of the book is simple – Einstein himself has been biographed (biographised?) to death, but no one has picked out this most famous of equations, dusted it down and told us what it means, where it comes from and what it has delivered. Allegedly, Bodanis was inspired to write the book after hearing see an interview with actress Cameron Diaz in which she commented that she’d really like to know what that famous collection of letters was all about. Although the book had been around for a while already when this review was written (September 2005), it seemed a very apt moment to cover it, as the equation is, as I write, exactly 100 years old. So when better to have a biography? Bodanis starts off by telling us about the individual elements of the equation. What the different letters mean, where the equal sign comes from and so on. This is entertaining, though he seems to tire of the approach on...
Post a Comment
Read more