Books
aardvarchaeology | July 21, 2011
Of late I have spent some time in the nightmare world of P.G. Wodehouse, reading his 1946 novel Joy in the Morning.* Written though it was after WW2, it is set in a timeless travesty of pre-WW1 England. Much of the humour, as you will know, revolves around the interplay between the mentally challenged Bertram Wooster and his manservant Jeeves who possesses Holmes-like intelligence and enormous erudition.
Wooster is about 30 and independently wealthy. He spends much of his time at gentleman's clubs, when not getting snagged in extremely contrived intrigues that usually involve people…
aardvarchaeology | July 20, 2011Since the autumn of 2009, I've spent most of my research efforts studying sacrificial finds in the Bronze Age local landscape. I was thus pleasantly surprised (though a little disappointed because I missed the whole thing) when I learned that there had been a symposium on the theme "Sacrificial finds in the Late Bronze Age local landscape" at the museum in Viborg, Jutland, in March last year. Recently, only about a year after the event, a fine proceedings volume (104 pp., A4 format, 2-column text, colour printing) was published, and I was kindly sent a copy for review here on Aard.
The volume…
aardvarchaeology | July 17, 2011Neal Stephenson is an unusually inventive writer of historical and futuristic fiction. I have previously reviewed his 2008 novel Anathem here. And somehow I have now come to think of one of his weirdest ideas: the subterranean orgy computer in The Diamond Age.
This 1995 book bursts with far-out motifs and ideas, to the extent that I can't say I really understood everything very well when reading it back then. I found the ending confusing and dissatisfying, possibly because I wasn't entirely clued in to what happened or what it meant. But I did get this about the subterranean Drummer…
pharyngula | July 5, 2011OK, this is no fair. This is an illustration for an alternative history novel, a book about World War I as fought between biotechnology (Darwinists) vs. industrialists (Clankers).
Now I really want to read Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld. I'm unfamiliar with the author, I have only the vaguest notions about the content of the book, but I just put it on my Amazon wish list for that picture alone.
pharyngula | July 4, 2011Richard Wiseman, the fabulously funny and enlightening skeptical psychologist, has written a book called Paranormality which is a fabulously funny and enlightening dissection of paranormal claims; I got an advance copy because I'm special and I recommend it highly, and so do Skepchicks. However, something strange happened. Wiseman is British, and he published in the UK, but when he tried to get it picked up in the US, publishers balked.
The book has done well in the UK and has been bought by publishers in lots of other countries. However, the major American publishers were reluctant to…
aardvarchaeology | June 20, 2011
Spent four hours at the EuroCon 2011 science fiction convention Sunday afternoon. That's about enough for me. Though I love sf, and I've made a few appearances as speaker and panelist at cons, I've never really been part of sf fandom. It has always struck me as a strangely rearward-looking kind of futurism as Swedish sf fandom's oft-recalled glory days occurred in the 70s. But there certainly is life in the movement still: this con was the biggest one ever in this country, with ~800 international participants.
I came mainly to hear Charles Stross do a reading. iPad in hand, he gave us an…
pharyngula | June 19, 2011I received two packages the other day. The first was a substantial box, and when I opened it, I discovered a Bible, something called the Amplified Bible, a CD called "He is exalted" with recorded sermons just in case I was illiterate, a bookmark with a quote from Proverbs, a thank you note for allowing them to share the word of god with me today, and a copy of Bill Wiese's "23 Minutes in Hell", which purportedly documents in graphic detail an account of the author's brief sojourn in Hell, just in case the nice approach didn't work on me. Apparently someone decided to buy the missionary…
gregladen | June 15, 2011Living Dinosaurs: The Evolutionary History of Modern Birds is an academic anthology of key writing about bird evolution. There are two main things that distinguish this book: 1) It includes quite a bit on fossils and their bearing on bird evolution, a refreshing change from DNA-based phylogenies which can by and large only address later questions of bird evolution; and 2) It includes a lot more about the early evolutionary context of birds (such as in the context of theropods) than one usually sees, rather than the diversification of birds per se, though it does address the latter as well.…
pharyngula | June 15, 2011Back in the day, when I was a teenager, I used to hop on the bus to Seattle and spend a day wandering the seedier parts of town. I'd get off around Pike Street, near the Farmers' Market, and wander around 1st and 2nd Avenues, which were not nice places for a quiet young man. But I had an obsession and a pocket full of change, and I was jonesing for a fix. I'd go to the porn shops.
Maybe you don't remember 70s-era porn shops. Maybe you weren't even born then. But the like of these beasts is something that we'll not see again. They were beautiful.
The typical layout was to have walls covered…
pharyngula | June 12, 2011I've met Jon Ronson a few times, including this past weekend, but I can't say I really know him — we've exchanged a few words, I've heard him give a talk, I now him as the short intense guy with the very bad hair, slightly neurotic, expressive, and funny. But I read his book, The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) this afternoon while on the train from Cheltenham to Heathrow, and I have this idea of who he is.
He's Hemingway. Yeah, you know, the macho, hard-drinking man's man who would run with the bulls or fish for the marlin or pretend to be a war…
aardvarchaeology | June 10, 2011
Ever since I started blogging in 2005 I've been talking about my Ãstergötland project, where I've been chasing the elite of the mid-to-late 1st millennium in one of Sweden's richest agricultural provinces. This project has produced a number of journal papers, talks, radio appearances, archive reports and additions to museum collections. But there hasn't been a book (though Dear Readers John Massey and Deborah Sabo have helped copy-edit a manuscript).
Soon there will be one.
I'm very pleased to be able to show you its cover, designed by Tina Hedh-Gallant (who is also laying out the contents…
cagapakis | June 9, 2011
It's not every day that you read about measuring skulls in the contemporary scientific literature. It's kind of a quaintly old-timey, quaintly racist kind of thing to do. But here we are, with a brand new paper about skull measuring in PLoS Biology. Already quite a few blog-words have been written in support of this new paper, which disproves Stephen Jay Gould's assertion in The Mismeasure of Man that George Morton's 1839 skull measurements were fudged intentionally or unintentionally by his racist bias.
I haven't read a lot of Gould, and I'm pretty convinced by the numbers in the paper…
gregladen | June 7, 2011I've recently reviewed bird or nature books for some fairly exotic places (see this for all the reviews) including the Antarctic and the West Indies. Now, I have a book on the birds of one of the most exotic places ever: New Jersey!
OK, if you are from New York like I am, you know that was a joke. In all seriousness, New Jersey is an excellent place to go to see wildlife and I'm not talking about Atlantic City.
New Jersey has some of the largest swamps and marshes around, an extensive shoreline, and extensive pine barrens. Why, there are even mountains. The state, small and flattish…
gregladen | June 6, 2011I'm sitting here looking at Antarctic Wildlife: A Visitor's Guide. I've never been to the Antarctic so I can't tell you what I think of this book from the pragmatic angle of how well it works as a guide, but I can tell you that I've learned a number of things just looking at the book. For one thing, I had no idea that almost all tourist visits to Antarctica go to the same general area of the continent. I guess that makes sense given the geography of the region, but it had not occurred to me before.
I've guided a number of tours in Africa and some of my clients were very serious world…
gregladen | June 3, 2011On of my favorite books is A Bend in the River by V. S. Naipaul. It is a story set in at the junction of a native and expat community in an African rain forest country with a not very despotic leader (the "Big Man") at a time when a civil war was about to arrive on the scene. I like the book because of the writing, because of the story, because one of the character is supposedly based on someone I vaguely know (that's always fun) and because I was there .... living at the juncture of an expat and native community in a rain forested African country with a not-to-despotic leader named Mobutu…
gregladen | June 2, 2011 The West Indies includes the Lucayan Archipelago (Bahamas and Turks and Caicos Islands); the Greater Antilles (Cuba, Hispaniola [Dominican Republic and Haiti], Jamaica, Cayman Islands); the Lesser Antilles (Leeward Islands [the Virgin Islands of Saint Croix, Saint Thomas, Saint John, Water Island, Tortola, Virgin Gorda, Anegada, Jost Van Dyke], Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, Antigua, Barbuda, Redonda, Saint Martin, Saba, Saint Eustatius, Saint Barthélemy, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Montserrat Guadeloupe); the Windward Islands (Dominica, Martinique, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines…
gregladen | June 1, 2011I recommend The Birder's Handbook: A Field Guide to the Natural History of North American Birds. It was written by three serious bird experts and it will serve any bird watcher in North America very well. Here's how you use it. You go bird watching and later, you look up one or two of the birds you saw, read the entries on them, read the entries cross referenced in those first entries, and otherwise explore around this compendium of information about bird ecology and biology.
The Book
For instance, you spy a Clapper Rail. So you look that up and see the reference to the essay on rails.…
gregladen | May 29, 2011Richard Tokumei has written a book that is so bad he is ashamed to put his own name on it. "Richard Tokumei" is the pen name of a 'writer/editor in Southern California [with] degrees in Humanities and Phychology from the University of California Berkeley" and he has produced a book designed to anger everyone who hears of it in order to create needless sensation and thus, sell copies. Which, once people get their hands on, will make rather low quality toilet paper.
Monkeys On Our Backs: Why Conservatives and Liberals Are Both Wrong About Evolution includes an inexplicable mix of "correct"…
gregladen | May 28, 2011It is Memorial Day Weekend, which can only mean one thing. It's time for this year's Summer Reading Recommendations List! Unlike the Summer Readings Suggestions: Science list, these books are primarily (but not entirely) fiction. Since I've not read very much fiction over the last year, I polled my facebook friends and assembled their advice here. You may be thinking "Who cares about Laden's facebook friends, what do they know?" and you'd probably be right about that for a lot of topics, but not reading. These people can read! In fact, two or three of them are published authors.…
aardvarchaeology | May 28, 2011
Len Fisher is an Australian physicist based in England. He's also a foodie involved in molecular gastronomy. In 2002 he published an essay collection on the UK market, The Science of Everyday Life, which has now been re-issued for US readers.
Before looking at the book's contents I have to comment on how Fisher's US publisher, Arcade, has packaged the thing. On the front cover is a nonsensical pseudo-mathematical formula made from clip-art, stating that one's enjoyment of a doughnut approaches infinity as the amount of coffee and the number of empty cups associated with it decreases. This…