Books
aardvarchaeology | March 26, 2015Dear Reader, it is with great pleasure that I announce the PDF publication of my fifth monograph,* In the Landscape and Between Worlds. The paper version will appear in April or May. Here's the back-cover blurb.
Bronze Age settlements and burials in the Swedish provinces around Lakes Mälaren and Hjälmaren yield few bronze objects and fewer of the era's fine stone battle axes. Instead, these things were found by people working on wetland reclamation and stream dredging for about a century up to the Second World War. Then the finds stopped because of changed agricultural practices.
The objects…
aardvarchaeology | March 21, 2015Ken & Robin have an interesting discussion in the most recent episode of their podcast, on childhood fears. Specifically, they talk about childhood responses to horror stories and movies. I was inspired to write about my own childhood horrors.
Luckily there were no actual horrors in my childhood. Nobody around me was violent or insane or very ill or destitute or hooked on drugs. The years of low-intensity schoolyard bullying was painful but nowhere near my breaking point. Still, I was really scared of some stuff, starting with Selma Lagerlöf.
Nobel laureate Selma Lagerlöf is one of the…
aardvarchaeology | March 16, 2015Stephen Jarvis's upcoming novel Death and Mr Pickwick is a sprawling book, in terms both of its 800-page girth and of its structure. I've read the first third and decided to write about it now before I forget the details.
There's a present-day frame story about the narrator writing the book, commissioned by an old man obsessed with Late Georgian London's printmaking and periodicals. This story only adds up to a few pages strewn through the first third, but there are weird things going on in it. Why does the narrator suddenly bring up his anorexic mother? I'm more curious about where this is…
gregladen | March 11, 2015Dana Nuccitelli is a key communicator in the climate change conversation. He is co-writer with John Abraham at the Climate Consensus - the 97% blog at the Guardian, and has contributed hundreds of entries to John Cook’s famous site SkepticalScience.com. He has measurably helped people to understand climate change science and the nuances of the false debate based over climate manufactured by science deniers.
And, he’s written a book!
Graphic from Cook, Nuccitelli, Et Al 2013 paper quantifying the consensus on climate change. This figure also appears in "Climatology and Pseudoscience"…
gregladen | February 26, 2015"Please Don't Paint Our Planet Pink!: A Story for Children and their Adults" is a new children's book by Gregg Kleiner about global warming. The idea is simple. Imagine if you could see CO2? In the book, it is imagined to be pink. The imagining takes the form of a quirky father, one imagines him to be an inventor of some sort, coming up with the idea of making goggles that would allow you to see CO2 as a pink gas. This is all described by the man's patient but clearly all suffering son, who eventually dons the prototype goggles and sees for himself.
I read this to Huxley, age 5, and he…
aardvarchaeology | February 14, 2015I've finalised the cover of my upcoming book with designer Bitte Granlund!
Cover image: detail of a rock-art panel at Hemsta in Boglösa, Uppland. An axe with its characteristic s-shaped haft, an incomplete ship and two cupmarks. According to Johan Ling, the panel’s ship types and the level above the sea indicate a date in Per. II, about 1400 cal BC. The closest known Early Bronze Age deposition site is Hjältängarna at Grop-Norrby in Vårfrukyrka, about 14 km to the NNW. An axe was deposited there a century or two after the Hemsta carvings were made. Photograph by Sven-Gunnar Broström.
aardvarchaeology | February 5, 2015Bitte Granlund of Happy Book has sent me PDF proofs for my forthcoming Bronze Age book, looking bee-you-tiful!
If you'd like to help me proofread it, please email me. Everyone who finds ten errors gets a dedicated copy sent by mail.
To my delight, the response to my plea has been strong. At the moment I believe I have enough volunteer proof readers.
aardvarchaeology | December 27, 2014 Jon Peterson: Playing at the World. Highly recommended to gamers!
Here are my best reads in English during 2014. My total was 49 books and 14 of them were e-books. Find me at Goodreads!
In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build a Perfect Language. Arika Okrent 2009.
Redshirts. John Scalzi 2012. Space opera from the viewpoint of the nameless extras.
The Bone People. Keri Hulme 1984. This novel has great strengths in the language and characterisation. And a major weakness in the almost nonexistent plotting…
aardvarchaeology | October 20, 2014Anders Winroth (born in 1965) is a Swedish historian who received his PhD from Columbia in 1996 and now holds an endowed professorship in history at Yale. He has written several books on the Viking Period for lay readers, the latest one of which I've been given to review.
The main contents of The Age of the Vikings is organised into eight chapters on:
Raiding and warfare
Emigration and overseas settlement
Ships in reality and mythology
Trade
The development of political leadership
Home life in Scandinavia and the roles of women
Religion
Arts and letters
All eight are well written and…
gregladen | October 17, 2014You know Guy Himber's work. He worked on special effects for Aien 3, Underworld, Independence Day, Edward Scissorhands, I, Robot, lots of other productions. And now, he is playing around with LEGO.
Steampunk Lego by Guy Himber is subtitled "The illustrated researches of various fantastical devices by Dr. Herbert Jabson, with epistles to the Crown, Her Majesty Queen Victoria; A travelogue in 11 chapters." The book itself is all steampunky, in fact heavily steampunky, with brown colors, gears and wheels as background images, and victorian techno-objects decorating a faux photographic album…
gregladen | September 22, 2014I recently reviewed Climate Smart and Energy Wise by Mark McCaffrey. The National Center for Science Education is giving away a free chapter, as a PDF, of this book. CLICK HERE TO GET IT.
Also, there is an event coming up. CLEAN Call: Climate Smart & Energy Wise Book Preview with Mark McCaffrey. Click through to get details and participate.
gregladen | September 15, 2014Pterosaurs: Natural History, Evolution, Anatomy by Mark P. Witton is a coffee-table size book rich in detail and lavishly illustrated. Witton is a pterosaur expert at the School of Earh and Environmental Sciences at the University of Portsmouth. He is famous for his illustrations and his work in popular media such as the film "Walking With Dinosaurs 3D."
The first pterosaur fossil was found in the late 18th century in the Jurassic Solnhofen Limestones, in Germany, the same excellent preservational environment that would later yield Archaeopteryx. They person who first studied it thought…
gregladen | September 14, 2014The Age of Radiance: The Epic Rise and Dramatic Fall of the Atomic Era by Craig Nelson (author of Rocket Men: The Epic Story of the First Men on the Moon) is a well done history of the atomic age. If you are a bit squeamish (justifiably I'm sure) about the nuclear industry or nuclear stuff generally you'll find Nelson's dismissal of your concerns as the product of a public relations fail on the part of the nuclear industry to be patronizing and annoying, but there isn't too much of that in the book, and he's partly right; most fears people have about nuclear energy are not especially accurate…
gregladen | September 13, 2014My friend Iain Davidson tagged me with the facebook novel meme. Here are the rules: Oh, hell, never mind the rules. I wanted to provide links to the books so I decided to do this as a blog post which I'll paste on my facebook page (and of course tag some unlucky facebook friend).
Here it is. I broke some rules. So what?
Moment in the Sun: Report on the Deteriorating Quality of the American Environment by Dr. Robert Reinow was my Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. As a child I watched Reinow’s Sunrise Semester course on TV a couple of times. He would give a lecture on some manner or other by…
gregladen | September 13, 2014There are over 10,000 species of bird on the Earth today. There is one blog called "10,000 Birds" for which I write a monthly article, in case you did not know. But this post is about Ten Thousand Birds: Ornithology Since Darwin, a book by Tim Birkhead, Jo Wimpenny and Bob Monegomerie.
Birds and various studies of birds are central to evolutionary theory and the development of all of the surrounding biology and science. Here's a short list of key roles birds have played in evolutionary biology:
Darwin's study of pigeon breeding was central to On the Origin of Species and later works.
The…
gregladen | September 12, 2014Rare Birds of North America is the only extensive treatment I've see of the so called "vagrant birds" in the US and Canada. Most, or at least many, traditional bird books have a section in the back for rare birds, occasionals or accidentals, which one might see now and then. But when you think about it, how can five or even a dozen species in a bird book really do justice to the problem of spotting birds that are normally not supposed to be spotted?
I'm reminded of one South African bird guide that has a half dozen penguin species listed in it. There is only one species of penguin in South…
gregladen | September 9, 2014There is a new book out on Penguins: Penguins: The Ultimate Guide written and edited by Tui De Roy, Mark Jones, and Julie Cornthwaite.
It is a beautiful coffee table style book full of information. All of the world's species are covered (amazingly there are only 18 of them) and there are more than 400 excellent photos. The book covers penguin science (science about them, not by them). There is also quite a bit about their conservation.
The layout of the book is interesting. The last section of the book, by Julie Cornthwaite includes portraits of each species, and a compendium of…
gregladen | September 9, 2014Climate change is emotional, especially when the effects are disastrous and people's lives are ruined. It is vague, sometimes. For example, bad weather happens and always has happened, so an increase in frequency or severity of bad weather isn't necessarily qualitatively novel, and can be hard to put one's finger on. Although the negative effects of climate change are already here, more serious effects are in our future. So, climate change has a component that is mysterious and hard to relate to, because it is in the future. Climate change is global, but spotty on a given day or in a given…
aardvarchaeology | September 8, 2014"He was a splendid specimen of manhood, standing a good two inches over six feet, broad of shoulder and narrow of hip, with the carriage of the trained fighting man. His features were regular and clear cut, his hair black and closely cropped, while his eyes were of a steel gray, reflecting a strong and loyal character, filled with fire and initiative."
Edgar Rice Burroughs 1917, A Princess of Mars
*
Frank N. Furter: "How forceful you are, Brad. Such a perfect specimen of manhood. So... dominant. You must be awfully proud of him, Janet. Do you have any tattoos, Brad?"
Richard O'Brien 1975, The…
gregladen | September 8, 2014According to John Berger, author of the newly released book Climate Peril: The Intelligent Reader's Guide to Understanding the Climate Crisis, time is running out. The climate is changing in ways that will bring unwanted results, and we as a species are slow off the mark to do something about it.
Climate Peril: The Intelligent Reader's Guide to Understanding the Climate Crisis begins with a description of the global climate in the not too distant future, 2100. It is of course a guess, perhaps fiction. But Berger's description of the world in 2100 is plausible, and much of it probable. We…