Skip to main content

Tree Stories - Stefano Mancuso (Trans. Gregory Conti) ***

It's always interesting to see something new in popular science, and without doubt plants (and, in this case, trees) tend not to get enough of a slice of the biology market (I don't really count 'nature' as popular science as there's very little science in it). So I had considerable hopes for Tree Stories. But in practice, although there are some genuinely interesting little snippets of information around the way that trees interact with each other through their root networks, the book was problematic. One issue I had was that each 'story' - each chapter in effect - is continuous, without any section breaks. There is no substructure it just goes on and on, which was quite wearing. Worse, though, was that despite this book being labelled popular science, the science content was extremely thin on the ground.

Take the opening story. It comes across as a typical literary tale in which nothing much happens. Two academics become acquaintances after battling over secondhand book purchases. They share an interest in a book on 'liberty trees' - planted across both revolutionary France and post independence America. The book portrays the trees as a network and Stefano Mancuso points out in an actual forest the tree roots form a connective network and tells us that the trees are a superorganism like ants or bees. This is just throwing a thin sprinkle of facts into a self-indulgent story. It's not popular science. How does this network form? No idea. In a superorganism the individual insects are highly specialised - how do the trees specialise? No mention of this. In a superorganism, the individual insects can't survive alone - surely this isn't really true of trees? Is a forest not more like Facebook than a superorganism? Don't know. This is not science.

The second essay on plants, and particularly trees, in cities was much more effective - there was less of a memoir feel and a bit more science content, though it’s odd that with Mancuso's obsession with tree networks, he pretty much ignores the way IT networks are reducing the importance of cities as places to live. The story gives a strong argument for the wider greening of our urban spaces, particularly in the face of climate change. This is mostly about urban planning rather than any underlying scientific principles, but at least it’s interesting.

Most of the rest of the chapters are more like the second with at least a spot of scientific content, though it's often just a few words. So, for example, in a piece on the wood used in famous ancient violins like a Stradivarius there are maybe two lines on why a particular wood might be unusually good in the role. But the rest is atmospheric woffle. And there's a purely anti-scientific statement that blind testing showing these violins aren't better wasn't right in Mancuso's opinion - the only scientific test mentioned gets dismissed out of hand where it's clearly a case where only double blinding could give useful information.

I've no objection to this sort of book (though it's not one I would usually read), but it just doesn't do what it says on the tin.

Hardback:   
Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Mathematics with Love – Mary Stopes-Roe *****

Admittedly it’s early days (this review is written in January), but this, for me, is the surprise hit of the year so far! I approached this book with trepidation, but found it absolutely delightful. It is described on the cover as the “courtship correspondence of Barnes Wallis, inventor of the bouncing bomb”, and contains a series of letters between Wallis and his cousin and eventual wife Molly Bloxham, along with some useful annotation by their daughter, Mary. The courtship itself is not without difficulties, as Wallis was 18 years older than the 17-year-old Molly at the start of the correspondence, and her father, not surprisingly, wasn’t too pleased about the interest of such an elderly suitor, but that isn’t the only reason the letters are interesting – it’s also because of maths, and Wallis’s position in the UK as the engineering hero of the Second World War. (Incidentally, it seemed very strange to see letters addressed to “Barnes” – I had always assumed Barnes Wallis was a ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that ‘Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...
Post a Comment
Read more

On Time - Jim Al-Khalili *****

By a small margin Jim Al-Khalili's The World According to Physics is my favourite of his books, both because the 'three pillars' concept at its heart works so well - but also because it's short. On Time is somewhat heavier, but thankfully not a wrist-buster. It might seem at first sight odd that a book on a subset of physics is considerably longer than one covering the whole thing, but time is one of those subjects that inevitably involves considerable complexities and needs depth. As Al-Khalili establishes, it's hard to think of any other scientific concept where our perception of it - what he refers to as manifest time or psychological time - is so different from the view from physics. Some physicists go so far as to suggest that time doesn't exist at all. In the book, Al-Khalili sets out (to my mind quite successfully) both to explain why they think this is the case, but also why it's not the best interpretation of time. I'd certainly note that I...
Post a Comment
Read more