Yackman’s Adventure Book Reviews

The Hudson: a History

Sat, 24 Apr 2010 21:34:57 -0400

Title: The Hudson: a History
Author: Tom Lewis
Publisher: Yale University Press, New Haven/London
Copyright Date: 2005
ISBN: 978-0-300-11990-9
Hard/Soft Cover: Soft Cover

Reviewed By: Don Yackel

Yackman’s Rating: 8 out of 10

Review: This is the second book on the Hudson and the early history of New York that I have read this year (see Island at the Center of the World by Russell Shorto). Both books are excellent and complement each other. Island focuses on the Dutch history of New Amsterdam and the Hudson as far north as Albany. It’s interest is in the people and culture that shaped the character of the island that was to become New York and how that culture differed from the British colonies that surrounded it, giving New York its unique character.

This book focuses on the history of the river itself, starting with pre-history and continuing through today. For those of us who have spent time in the Hudson River Valley, and especially for those of us who have paddled the river and seen it up close, the people and places mentioned through the centuries of European settlement will sound very familiar. I have lived in, visited, paddled through and learned about so many of the places in this book. The book enriches that familiarity by making rich connections between those familiar places and their history. I was especially excited by the description of the Hudson’s role in the Revolutionary war because I had visited West Point, the Saratoga battlefield and Ticonderoga. This book pulls all of those important events and places together uniting them around the central concept of the river.

I was moved by the story of Verplanck Colvin, who surveyed the eight million acre wilderness known as the Adirondacks and was almost single handedly responsible for the establishment of the six million acre Adirondack Park. Colvin was the first to identify the headwaters of the Hudson with this familiar description: the headwater of the Hudson was, “…a minute unpretending tear of the clouds…a lonely pool, shivering in the breeze of the mountains, and sending its limpid surplus through Feldspar Brook, to the Opalescent Verplanck Colvin (1847–1920) was a lawyer, author, illustrator and topographical engineer whose understanding and appreciation for the environment of the Adirondack Mountains led to the creation of New York's Forest Preserve and the Adirondack Park.
Born on January 4, 1847 in Albany, New York to Andrew James Colvin, ......

Taken from Wikipedia: Read More at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verplanck_ColvinRiver, the well-spring of the Hudson.”

Another excellent bit of storytelling depicts Lincoln’s train trip across New York State on his way to be inaugurated president in 1861. As he arrives in New York City to a tepid welcome it is noted that the actor, John Wilkes Booth, is starring in a major New York play in a theater just down the street. This is an awesome bit of historical research connecting coincidental facts that place these two men in close proximity; a premonition of what we know will come.

This is an excellent book. If you enjoy history, especially as it relates to the places you are surrounded by and live among, I strongly recommend this interesting and well written book.

“ There Is No Toilet Paper On the Road Less Traveled”

Mon, 12 Apr 2010 14:40:04 -0400

Title: There’s No Toilet Paper on the Road Less Traveled
The Best of Travel Humor and Misadventure

Author: Edited by Doug Lansky
Publisher: Traveler’s Tales, Inc., San Francisco, CA
Copyright Date: 1998
ISBN: 1-885211-27-9
Hard/Soft Cover: Soft Cover
Reviewed By: Yackman

Yackman’s Rating: 7/10

Review: This is a great book to take on a multi-day paddling trip. It consists of twenty-eight short stories about travel misadventures by authors like Dave Barry, Bill Bryson and many others. The stories are just long enough to fill that space between crawling into the sleeping bag and lights out, and the book is small enough to pack easily (I know this seems like a silly concern, but I have tried to pack oversized, thick books on trips and they are always problematic. And e-books are only a solution if you can keep them dry and have access to a power source.)

What is funny to me may not be funny to you. So, as with all humor writing, you will find some offerings hilarious and others sort of ho-hum. For instance I found the first offering, a story called “Nudity is a State of Mind” by Alan Zwieble, FD/LOL (text talk for “Falling Down, Laughing Out Loud”). Another called “Deep Fried Potato Bug” by Richard Sterling was equally funny with an added “eeeeou, gross” factor in it. And for any parent who has made the pilgrimage to Disney World, Caryl Rivers story, “Dragging the Family to the Magic Kingdom” will really hit home. A few others were not so funny or interesting to me (I won’t color your thinking on these by naming them).

All in all, this is a book worth reading. It’s not deep or thought provoking. It is a light, fun read.

STIFF: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 09:19:22 -0400

Book Reviewed: STIFF: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
Author: Mary Roach
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., New York
Copyright Date: 2003
ISBN 978-0-393-32482-2 pbk.
Softcover
Reviewed by: Yackman

Yackman’s Rating: 7 out of 10

Review: OK, so why would I read a book like this? The topic does make one a little queezy. But the cover read “New York Times Best Seller” , and there were three full pages of endorsements, plus the back cover, saying how funny and unusual the book was. There were so many endorsements, that I wondered if a selling job was being done. But while I found the dark humor forced at times, the book requires some dark humor just to cope with the content. And it does force you to think about your own “final arrangements”. What happens to us after we …die, pass on, cross over, kick the bucket, take the dirt nap, expire, go to heaven, go to hell - you fill in the blank? Or more precisely, what happens to our bodies after we die? Surprisingly, it’s more complicated than you would suspect.
Most people will go the traditional embalming and burial route, while a significant minority will opt for cremation. Or, barring no last wishes on the part of the deceased (oops, I need to add deceased to my list above), relatives will decide what is to be done. The descriptions of what happens to embalmed and buried bodies, sealed in airtight vaults is only slightly more unpleasant than that of cremation.
A large part of the book focuses on what happens to bodies left for research. I learned that the person donating his or her body for research has essentially no control over how it will be used. Most people who donate their body for research have a vision of contributing to medical research in some way, either through the training of doctors or by becoming lab specimens that will aid in the understanding of disease. Some are used for these purposes. But others are consigned to the “body farm” at the university of Tennessee, where through their decay in the open, they aid forensic scientists in solving time of death issues (see the chapter “Life After Death”). A few go to the military to test body armor and the stopping power of new weaponry (see the chapter “The Cadaver Who Joined The Army”). Some become human crash test dummies, used to calibrate injury and death stresses on mechanical crash test dummies (see the chapter “Dead Man Driving”). Then there are a whole raft of chapters on cannibalism, brain death, reanimation, crucifixion experiments and how remains are used to reconstruct airplain crashes.
Roach’s first chapter, “A Head Is A Terrible Thing to Waste”, really sets the tone for the whole book. Roach is invited (or finagles an invitation to) a seminar for plastic surgeons. The seminar will teach a specific facelift technique. Roach is ushered into a room with forty-one tables. Each table has a disposable aluminum turkey roasting pan on it. Each pan is covered with a cloth. Under each cloth is a human head for the seminar surgeon to practice on.
There is a lot of dark humor in this chapter as Roach tries to maintain her equilibrium. In the end, she manages to understand that this is a good use of a cadaver. It allows the surgeon to practice so that he or she does not make mistakes on a living person. But along the way, she can’t help but speculate about whose job it is to remove all the heads from the bodies for an activity like this one. And of course, she searches out and meets “Yvonne…the cadaver beheader”. Roach says, “My end of the conversation takes place entirely in my head and consists of a repeated line. You cut off heads. You cut off heads. You cut off heads.” I’m sure I would have been thinking the same thing. How would anyone maintain their objectivity? How do you not wonder about the person that lived in that body whose head you are removing? Could you imagine dinner conversation with “Yvonne…the cadaver beheader”?
Reading STIFF got me thinking about my own “final wishes”. Maybe it’s my age, or that there have been so many deaths in my family over the past few years – I am now the oldest living person in my immediate family. When I’ve thought about the disposal of my body I have been adamant that I do not want burial – I’m too claustrophobic. Even though I know intellectually that it won’t matter, I get into such a sweat thinking about being locked up in a small box deep in the ground that I just reject the whole idea. I’m not really into donating for medical research either, though I’ not sure why. It may have to do with the needs of the living. That basically leaves cremation, which is probably still my choice. I always thought it would be nice to fertilize a garden somewhere. However, STIFF tells me that cremains have no real nutritive value. Maybe Lisa would like to keep me in a jar on a shelf, or under the bed where I can keep an eye on her.
Then there is chapter 11 – Out of the Fire and Into the Compost Bin”. A Swedish woman, Susanne Wiigh-Masak, is promoting a process where-by remains are freeze dried, bombarded by sound waves and reduced to compost. The idea is that such remains would be used to fertilize a memorial garden where the names of the dead would be posted and relatives could come and sit for comfort, should they want to do so (some of this is my elaboration on Wiigh-Masak’s ideas). I like the idea. It seems so much more positive than being locked in a box and stuck in the ground, or going up a chimney as sooty smoke. I don’t know if the idea will ever take off here before I need the service, but I’m ready so sign up!
All-in-all, this is a pretty good book. It is certainly thought provoking. It’s a little nauseating and uncomfortable in spots, but funny throughout. It does force the reader to think about a topic that is more easily avoided than dealt with, which can be a good thing.

Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why

Mon, 2 Mar 2009 21:42:15 -0500

Book Reviewed: Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why
True Stories of Miraculous Endurance and Sudden Death
Author: Laurence Gonzales
Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company, New York
Copyright Date: 2005
ISBN 978-0-393-32615-4
Hard/Softcover: Softcover
Reviewed by: Yackman

Yackman’s Rating: 10 points out of 10

Review: I previously reviewed Laurence Gonzales book, Everyday Survival: Why Smart People Do Stupid Things. Everyday Survival is the second book in this series on survival by Gonzales. The book being reviewed here, Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why, is the first book. I re-read it after reading Everyday Survival. I wanted to see if it was as good as I had remembered. If you have read the review on Everyday Survival, you know that I had some trouble with that book. It seemed to wander pretty far a field, dealing with survival in intellectual and often cosmic terms. The re-reading confirmed my earlier opinion of Deep Survival. It is an excellent book. It is much better grounded and contains analyses that can actually help in a survival situation. Gonzales dissects several accidents, identifying the mental and physical elements that enhance our chances of survival.
In a chapter entitled “Memories of the Future”, Gonzales describes how the emotional components of past events, positive and negative, can drive behavior in the future. For example, he details the fate of eight snowmobilers returning from a search and rescue mission in Alberta, Canada. Even though warned of a severe avalanche condition, three members of the group leave the others to roar up the face of a mountain in an activity called “high marking”. These men had participated in this activity before. They loved the feel of speed as their powerful machines climbed higher and higher up the mountain until gravity stopped them. The adrenalin rush and emotional high they experienced in this activity in the past overwhelmed the intellectual knowledge that the activity could cause an avalanche. They had never experienced an avalanche before, so they had no emotional connection to the event. But they surely had a highly positive emotional connection to high marking. They wanted to feel that rush and feel those positive emotions again. Emotion trumped knowledge in this instance. An avalanche occurred and several members of the group died.
This is not unlike the story of the three people on the beach as the Christmas Day tsunami roared ashore in Everyday Survival, Gonzales second survival book. Each person had a different emotional and intellectual connection to the idea of tsunami and the idea of the beach as a benign or possibly dangerous place. As a result, many peopled died while others saw the danger and lived.
In another chapter entitled, “The Anatomy of an Act of God”, Gonzales makes the case that accidents are inevitable in risky activities (i.e. wilderness hiking, mountain climbing, kayaking, flying, etc.), but that while a certain number of accidents will happen, an individual can take steps to prevent being the victim. He uses the image of sand slowly falling through an hourglass, creating a sand pile below. Most of the time the sand is stable, with each grain building the pile higher. But periodically the sand pile reaches a point where it is no longer stable, and the addition of one more grain causes the pile to collapse out of control until a new state of equilibrium is reached. Gonzales says that our participation in risky activities is like that. We go about these activities, trying to mitigate the danger, until they become almost routine. Then one small act destabilizes the sand pile and everything comes crashing down.
As an example, Gonzales tells the story of a world-class rock climber. While preparing for her climb she is distracted by an onlooker asking her a question. As she begins her climb, something gnaws at her mind, but she dismisses it. After reaching the top, she backs off, beginning her rappel to the bottom and falls sixty feet, nearly killing herself. The one small thing, the grain that destabilized the sand pile, was the distracting question. It came as she was threading the safety rope through the belaying device. She stopped to answer the question, then bent to tie her shoe and began her climb, while a little voice at the back of her mind tried to alert her that she had forgotten something.
In a second example, Gonzales tells of four friends, mountain climbers on Mount Hood. After a hard climb, they make the top and soon begin their decent. The four were roped together, something that is supposed to provide a measure of safety should one of the climbers slip. All four had practiced arresting falls by throwing themselves face down and hammering the blade of their ice ax into the frozen surface. This had always stopped a slide. As the four worked their way down, one person would plant the shaft of his ice ax in the frozen snow and use it to belay the others. When all had worked their way down as far as the rope would let them, the belayer would pull the ax, the bottom person would become the belayer and the process would start again. They had done this many times. But this time, when the belayer pulled his ax, he lost his balance and fell on his back. This was the grain that destabilized the sand pile. The whole system was based upon no slack in the rope, short falls, and falls coming from those below the top person. The belayer had thirty-five feet of rope between him and the next climber. By the time all the slack in the line was used up, he had rocketed past the second climber, sliding a full seventy feet before the rope snapped taught and he pulled number two, and then three and four with him off the mountain. On the way down, this group collided with another and carried them off the mountain too. As a result, several died and the rest were severely injured. In this case, what seemed like a trivial event, the pulling of the belay, turned out to be the grain that destabilized the sand pile, and all the careful planning came crashing down.
Gonzales claims that such accidents will happen, but do not have to happen to you or me. Practice, a willingness to adapt plans to developing conditions, training to keep emotional reactions in check and survival training among others can enhance your chances of survival. Yet he points out that you can be the perfect survivor with the correct attitude and ability to adapt to conditions and still die. While some folks who do everything wrong, survive. All you can do is skew the odd in your favor. In the end, it’s still be a craps shoot.
Gonzales tells the story of a plane flying over the Amazon jungle that crashed. Several adults and one teenaged girl survived. She was dressed in a white confirmation dress and white heals, and had a broken arm. Not your basic jungle survival gear or condition. The adults decided to stay put and wait for rescue, as we are taught to do in survival training. After waiting a day, the girl set off through the jungle alone. By all rights, she should have died. But after several weeks in the jungle, she made it out, while the others died. His lesson here is that sometimes the rule breakers survive while the rule-bound do not. Still, I wouldn’t have bet on the girl.
There is so much to this book, I could go on for much too long (perhaps I already have). While it has a chapter called “The Rules of Adventure”, this is not really a how-to book. It is more about understanding the anatomy of an accident and the psychological factors that impact survival - life or death. I highly recommend it to anyone who has ever participated, even casually, in a risky sport or activity. I’m sure you will pull something of value out of it. And, it’s a good read. I’ve read it twice and could read it again – just not right away!

Everyday Survival: Why Smart People Do Stupid Things

Sun, 1 Feb 2009 11:54:24 -0500

Yackman’s Rating: 7 out of 10 points

Book Reviewed: Everyday Survival: Why Smart People Do Stupid Things
Author: Laurence Gonzales
Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company, New York
Copyright Date: 2008
ISBN 978-0-393-05858-3
Hard/Softcover: Hardcover
Reviewed by: Yackman

Review: How do I begin to review this book? First, I’ll say that it’s not the book I expected it to be. Laurence Gonzales’ last book, Deep Survival, was an exploration of death and survival in extreme situations (the book is subtitled “Who Lives, Who Dies and Why”). It is an excellent book, which I will review at another time. I expected this book to be of a similar nature, but focused on much more ordinary situations in which people make inappropriate decisions, taking inappropriate actions that lead to injury or death.
In fact, the first third of the book does explore the psychological underpinnings of our decision-making and how it sometimes goes awry. These underpinnings are contained in two concepts: mental models, and scripts.
Mental Models: Human beings are constantly organizing information from the environment and constructing models to contain this information. For example, the first time you see a dog as a child, you have no reference for the model “dog”. With time and experience, you learn that a wide range of creatures, some short, some tall, some hairy, some hairless, some sleek, some blocky, all fit into the concept of “dog”. We build a mental model of what a dog is and every time we see a four legged creature, we compare it to this model and identify the creature as “dog” or something else matching some other model of a four legged animal. Once the model has been established, we can usually identify “dog” instantly, without conscious thought.
Scripts: Scripts are the behaviors we exhibit or actions we take in response to the model we have identified. For example, if our mental model of “dog” includes pleasant times with dogs and we see them as friendly, the script we run tells us that it is OK to approach a dog and expect it to receive our attention warmly. We don’t think about this action. We see a four legged animal, we identify it as a dog, our experience with other dogs has been positive, we run the script that says this dog will be friendly and is safe to approach. This all happens in an instant, without conscious thought. The model and script save us the effort of confronting every new situation as if it was our first experience with it. If the dog is friendly, our model is re-enforced, as is our behavior. If this dog snarls and snaps at our approach, we may be surprised. This unexpected behavior may cause us to adjust our model to “most dogs are friendly, but some are not”. It may also cause us to adjust our script so that in a new situation, we will approach a dog more cautiously until we know which kind of dog it is.
Gonzales gives a simple and funny example of a script over practiced and played out in a completely inappropriate and dangerous way. It seems that a new police recruit spent long hours with a friend practicing how to safely take a gun away from a criminal who had the jump on him. Over and over the cop would disarm his friend, then hand the gun back and do it again. One day, the real thing happened and all the training paid off, almost. The officer quickly disarmed the perpetrator, then just as quickly gave the gun back to him, just as he had practiced. That script had become so automatic that he could not vary it to be appropriate in the real situation.
Gonzales identifies one particularly dangerous model and its related scripts. He calls it “a vacation state of mind”. A vacation state of mind is one where we are in a relaxed state, with our defenses down. This makes us less able to experience our environment, to see what is really happening. He gives three examples from the 2005 tsunami in Indonesia.
There is video of a man standing on the beach as the sea pulled back for a huge distance, much further and faster than any tide. He stood there with his hands in his bathing suit pockets, watching as a huge wave built offshore. He didn’t move until the enormous wave, towering high above his head crashed down on him. He was never seen again. He was in a vacation state of mind. Even though what he was seeing was clearly unusual, his model for time at the beach said that beaches are benign places, and waves, even big ones, are part of being at the beach. Big waves are beautiful to watch and fun to play in, so his script said, “Let’s stay and see what happens. This could be fun.” Even with the enormous wave bearing down on him, about to engulf him, his model and its related script didn’t change, and he died.
On the same beach was a ten-year-old girl. She saw the sea pull back and became alarmed. She was remembering something in the back of her mind about tsunamis, something she had studied in school. She ran up the beach screaming for people to move to higher ground. Many people followed her and one hundred were saved. She had had less time to build a model of “beach” and had fresh information about possible dangers at the beach. She instantly changed her script from “let’s stay and watch”, to “run for your life”, and many people lived as a result. She had been able to break out of that vacation state of mind.
The final example was of a man and his buddies who had been out partying late the night before. While the others slept in their first floor hotel room, this fellow sat on his patio drinking coffee and enjoying the morning. Then he noticed the sea pull back. His model of beach included an experience with a much more benign tsunami when he was much younger. He immediately set his vacation state of mind aside and ran the script that said he and his friends were in danger. He quickly went inside and roused his buddies, dragging them complaining to the hotel’s forth floor. From that vantage point they could see the disaster unfolding around them, with the knowledge of their certain death in the flooded floors below them had they not moved quickly.
So what does this say to paddlers like us? I think it is easy, especially for the inexperienced paddler, to get into a vacation state of mind about kayaking. The mental model that most inexperienced paddlers have is that kayaking is a benign sport with few dangers. Thus we see many paddlers on our lakes and rivers without spray decks and with PFD’s stowed on deck or somewhere in the cockpit. Those of us who paddle more extensively and in all kinds of conditions see this as foolhardy. Our mental model includes sudden thunder squalls, unexpected powerboat wakes, sudden shifts and increases in wind. We know that it is too late to put on your PFD when you need it. We know that a spray deck can keep you afloat when waves are washing across the boat. Our mental model, based on greater experience keeps us more alert to changes in our environment, which then drives action.
I found this discussion of models, scripts and a vacation state of mind interesting, useful and relevant. The rest of the book pursued ideas that in my mind were connected to the idea of survival, but in largely abstract and philosophical ways. And while I found them very interesting, I struggled to maintain the connection with survival.
For instance, Gonzales spends a lot of time talking about energy and entropy. He talks about the energy in stars, bacteria and human beings (among many others) and how the high energy in these things moves to areas of low energy. He sees these things as channels for moving energy and achieving entropy. As an example, imagine a steaming cup of coffee sitting on a table in a cold room. The heat in the coffee represents energy, higher than the energy in the cold room. The heat from the coffee quickly radiates into the cold room, warming it ever so slightly until the coffee and the room reach the same temperature. A sort of equilibrium sets in, entropy has occurred.
Gonzales postulates that we are the prime movers of energy on the planet, dissipating huge amounts of energy, quickly moving the planet toward entropy. He connects this discussion to survival by saying that if we continue to use our existing models of living, which drive scripts causing us to use more and more resources, our species will ultimately fail. He makes a strong argument that life will continue through the examination of many organisms living in what we would consider places where life could not exist. But human life will not necessarily continue, unless we adjust our models and scripts to accommodate the new circumstances.
While Gonzales’ science writing is clear and accessible, his prose approaches poetry. Here is an excerpt from his description of a night spent with a colleague on a dry lakebed out west.
“On the night that Jonas and I spent out on that dry lake bed, I made a fire from the thorny greasewood bushes. The sun withdrew behind the mountains as the wind picked up and made the flames roar like a smelter, and drove orange cinders in wild arcs across the lake. I watched them bounce along until they dimmed and vanished in the distance. The vast empty land stretched away from the fire’s nervous glow, and the tarp snapped in the wind, as we sat and watched Cassiopeia rise across the misty wheel of the galaxy. Mars and Jupiter towed a hollow moon up through a far deck of stratocumulus. Holes in the clouds sent spotlights down across the white land and made a death’s head of the moon, until it breached the wall of clouds, luring mountains out of the dark. Above the cold moon, the Milky Way faded, and a million worlds winked out. The desert glowed all night with an eerie chemical light” Pg 255

That writing is so rich and so real that I can close my eyes and experience the feel and the smell and the sight of that night. There are moments of writing like that all through this book.
A common thread through out this book is Gonzales’ search for the origins of life. He traces our ancestry, following the trail back through exotic life forms to the first cells that contained life and concludes that given the abundance and diversity of life and of the elements that created it, life, simple living cells to complex beings, is inevitable. He sums this up in the final paragraph of the book.

“I cast myself across the land in search of enlightenment, and here is what I found: that matter and energy are one continuous flow. Nothing remains except the process. And that matter is so full of energy that it sometimes has to get right up and dance. And when it does, we call it life.” Pg 258

I do not understand everything in this book and there is much I have left out (self organizing systems, for instance), but this book makes you think. And in many ways it is a complement to Alan Weisman’s book, The World Without Us. I don’t recommend Everyday Survival for everyone, but if you find anything described here appealing or challenging, please read it. I’m glad I did. I will be digesting Everyday Survival for a long time.

The World Without Us

Thu, 15 Jan 2009 21:11:15 -0500

Book Reviewed: The World Without Us
Author(s): Alan Weisman
Publisher: Picador, St. Martin’s Press, New York
Copyright Date: 2007
ISBN-13: 978-0-312-42790-0
Hard/Softcover: Softcover
Reviewed by: Yackman

Yackman’s Rating: 6.5 out of 10

Review: This is not really an adventure book. But it is a book for people who value the outdoors and wilderness, and are concerned about what our species is doing to it. That certainly includes me, and I suspect, many of you.
The premise of the book began with a simple question. The author, Alan Weisman, had written an article on Chernobyl after the meltdown. He was surprised to find that nature had rushed in to fill the void left by a human population that disappeared overnight. Even with the radioactive surroundings, nature seemed better off without us.
After reading the article, an editor friend from Discover magazine called Weisman and asked the question, “What would happen if humans disappeared everywhere?” That question sparked the thinking and research that led to this book.
The book plays back and forth between the present, the past and the future, exploring what life could be without us. For example, Weisman examines the paradox of the last great extinction. About 10,000 years ago, all of the mega-fauna in the new world as well as Europe and Asia went extinct (Mastodons, saber toothed tigers, and giant ground sloths to name a few). Yet this did not happen in Africa. These extinctions appear to have been caused by the hunting activity of modern man. The paradox is that modern humans originated in Africa, yet Africa is the only continent where mega-fauna still exist. Why didn’t our African ancestors cause mega-fauna to go extinct there?
Weisman’s explanation for this is that the human species and African mega-fauna evolved together in a way that allowed man and animals to become wary and fearful of each other, to adapt to each other. Whereas, the mega-fauna elsewhere had evolved without the pressures of human kind. They were unaware of the dangers posed by this new human creature when he appeared. They were wiped out before they could adapt.
If this seems implausible, consider the Passenger Pigeon. It was estimated in the 1800’s that a single flock contained some 200 million individuals. Yet hunted for food and slaughtered as pests, they were all gone by the 1930’s. Weisman goes on to speculate about the re-emergence of some nearly extinct species in a world without us, and illustrates his speculation with examples of protected species that have rebounded.
In another section, Weisman speculates about what human creations will fall apart and which will last in a world without us. His speculation is always supported by science and real world examples. But the chapter that has stuck with me is on plastics. Plastics are nearly eternal. They are so indestructible that the first piece of Bakelite (the first plastic) ever produced is still in existence somewhere.
Billions of tons of plastic are dumped into landfills and the oceans every year. Many more tons of plastic enter the ocean through runoff from the land. These all wind up in oceanic “dead zones” or gyres. Gyres are like eddies in rivers. They are caused by currents that circulate around the dead zone, trapping debris within.
The author passed through the North Pacific Gyre, over a 1,000 miles wide and 10,000 square miles in size (this is one of six gyres in the world’s oceans). He found a continuous field of mostly plastic trapped there; plastic parts, Styrofoam packaging and cups, monofilament line, abandoned fishnets, plastic barrels, plastic floats and plastic bags-billions of plastic bags. The thing that is disturbing about this is that plastic doesn’t degrade. Even if it is shredded or ground into tiny pieces, it is still plastic. It will be here, long after we are gone. It will become part of the ecosystem. It is already being ingested by the smallest zooplankton. Soon it will be within the cells of every living thing. Kind of scary.
While the book has it’s scary parts, it is really an excellent combination of science fact and scientific speculation. It is surprisingly hopeful, in that it seems to show that without us, life will persist and even flourish, which is some sort of comfort.
The book ends with a plea to begin addressing the array of problems identified in the book. Weisman’s most controversial proposal addresses the pressure of population, which he sees as the central issue. He proposes limiting every couple to one child. This would actually reduce world population by mid-century instead if raising it from six to nine billion.
Agree or disagree, the book is thought provoking and an interesting read, especially if you are into science and the environment.

Into the Wild

Fri, 2 Jan 2009 17:50:55 -0500

Book Reviewed: Into the Wild
Author(s): Jon Krakauer
Publisher: Anchor Books/Doubleday, New York
Copyright Date: 1996
ISBN 0-385-48680-4
Hard/Softcover: Softcover
Reviewed by: Yackman

Yackman’s Rating: 8 points out of 10

Review: If The Final Frontiersman represents the “Yin” of outdoor stories, then Into the Wild represents the “Yang”. (1) Heimo Korth (The Final Frontiersman) grew up in a blue-collar family experiencing the violent anger of an alcoholic father. He took to the woods at an early age to avoid the anger at home. Chris McCandless, the focus of Into the Wild, grew up in a well–to-do Atlanta family, having money and privilege. Heimo had a first hand, practical knowledge of living in the outdoors. Chris held romanticized notions of escaping to the wild as a form of salvation. Heimo Korth learned and thrived in the Alaskan wilderness for twenty years. Chris McCandless died of sickness and starvation after only four months in a much less remote part of Alaska.
I have read several of Jon Krakauer’s books and they are all great reads. This is no exception. Drawing on police reports, interviews and Chris’s own journals, Krakauer weaves together a complete story from widely dispersed bits of information. Pulling from highlights and margin notes in the books Chris carried, Krakauer paints a picture of a young man who rejects his roots for adventure and romantic ideas of living in nature. Chris has no background or experience to temper his romantic notions. Naming himself “Alexander Supertramp”, McCandless heads out in an old Toyota, making his way through the south, west and upper mid-west before heading for Alaska to go “into the wild”. Along the way, he abandons his car in the desert and gives away all of his savings, some $25,000.00. He lives by working odd jobs and hitching rides. Chris makes good friends along the way, but nothing seems to hold him. Eventually he heads to Alaska to test himself by going “into the wild”. Wilderness was to be his salvation. Yet in four short months it killed him.
The story of how Chris McCandless gave up his privileged life, giving away all his worldly assets to live in trailer camps and work as a common laborer, is fascinating. Even more compelling is the tragedy that befalls his ill-fated expedition into the Alaskan wilderness. Krakauer does a masterful job of drawing on sketchy information, mixing it with conjecture and logical consequences to assemble a picture of McCandless’s final months and days. When Alexander Supertramp’s body is finally found by moose hunters, he has been dead for more than two weeks.
This is a great book and a great read. It has been made into a motion picture, which is equally good. I recommend both.

(1) Yin yang are opposing
Yin yang describe opposing qualities in phenomena. For instance, winter is yin to summer's yang over the course of a year, and femininity is yin to masculinity's yang in human relationships. It is impossible to talk about yin or yang without some reference to the opposite. wikipedia.org/wiki/Yin_yang

Through Hiker’s Eyes

Thu, 18 Dec 2008 20:53:18 -0500

Book Reviewed: Through Hiker's Eyes: Part 1
Author(s): Lawrence (Baro) Alexander
Publisher: Trail Peddler Publishing
Copyright Date: 2008
ISBN
Hard/Softcover:
Reviewed by: Stevie McAllister

Review: I like to do kayak expeditions when time allows. One good source for getting outdoor tips and advice are the various backpacker’s forum web sites. One very active one is at http://whiteblaze.net./. It has lots of posts with good and some bad advice regarding mostly The Appalachian Trail. Many posters were thru-hikers (hiked the full length of the Appalachian Trail, 2,000+ miles). It is a community where a lot of people know each other, had backpacked together and they communicated like they were very familiar with each other. Most had very strong opinions on what to bring and how to live on the trail. I liked this and learned a lot from this and other sites.
One of the members had recently released book one of a two part series titled "Through Hiker's Eyes" and it was getting some hype so I ordered it directly from the Publisher. It arrived three days later autographed by the author. I thought it would be a good book to read during my 45-minute subway commute to and from work. I started reading it last Friday on my way to work and again on my way home. I almost missed my stop, both directions, something I don't normally do. When I got home Friday after work, I continued reading late into the night and again when I had time on Saturday, finally finishing it last night (Sunday). I blew most of my weekend and thoroughly enjoyed it.
OK, so what was it about this book? Well it is a basically the first half of a trail journal from when the author hiked the full length of the Appalachian Trail, condensed into one book. The situations were all written in a fun and entertaining way. There were many characters sharing experiences and situations, one of the central characters being "Tummy" the authors stomach. Tummy controlled how far they would hike in a day and where they would stop, based on places to eat and the availability of soft drinks. It is comical, with some adventure mixed in.

If you like this kind of stuff, you'll like this book.

Stevie

PS. You may ask why I don't consider hiking? I don't have many miles left on a bad hip. Maybe some day I'll get it replaced and then hit the Appalachian Trail myself.

Thank you Stevie for this first Guest Book Review. If you would like to contribute (and I hope you will) please check the overview page for the review format, then send the review to me at the email address below.
Yackman

The Lone Survivor

Thu, 11 Dec 2008 21:54:28 -0500

Book Reviewed: Lone Survivor
Author(s): Marcus Luttrell with Patrick Robinson
Publisher: Little Brown & Company, New York
Copyright Date: 2007
ISBN 978-0-316-06760-7
Hard/Softcover: Softcover
Reviewed by: Yackman

Yackman’s Rating: 7 out of 10
Review: This book is advertised as a number one national bestseller. It is “the eyewitness account of Operation Redwing and the lost heroes of SEAL Team 10.” The story is told by Marcus Luttrell, the lone survivor of that operation. At the beginning of the book, Luttrell spends a lot of time boasting about being a Navy SEAL and damning the “liberal press”, the Geneva Accords and the Rules of Engagement. As a moderate liberal and a supporter of the Accords and Rules of Engagement, I tried to keep an open mind until I could see where this story was going. Soon Luttrell got into a long description of SEAL training. SEAL training is incredibly difficult. The dropout rate during training is very high; it ran about 60% in Luttrell’s group. Only the most physically able and highly motivated can make it.
Luttrell does make it and is soon shipped off to Afghanistan. After a number of missions, he and three others are selected for a highly dangerous mission high in the mountains of the Hindu Kush. They are to covertly approach and observe a tribal village, looking for a Taliban leader named Sharmak (not his real name). Luttrell’s job, as a skilled sniper, was to get close enough to kill Sharmak. His sniper’s rifle was accurate up to a quarter mile away. Still, with little cover high in the mountains, getting that close would be difficult.
The story really hinges on a moral dilemma faced by the four men when three goat herders, two adult men and a boy, stumble into them as they approached the target village. The Rules of Engagement and the Geneva Accords forbid the killing of non-combatant civilians. But were these three truly non-combatants? If the SEALs let them go, would they run to the Taliban with the information that four Americans were in their mountains? The four men discuss what should be done with the three. Should they kill them and hide their bodies? Or should they let them go?
This was not an easy decision. Sitting safe in my armchair it is easy to say they must let the herders go. It’s not right to coldly kill people who may be totally innocent. But these men were surrounded by Taliban who hated Americans and the very idea that they might be in these mountains. Marcus takes us through the debate between what is right tactically (kill them), what the Rules of Engagement direct them to do (protect non-combatants) and what their own religious beliefs tell them to do (let them go). They had no way to detain them, and detained or dead, they would soon be missed and a search initiated. In the end they vote; one says kill them, one abstains and two, including Marcus vote to let them go, which is what they do.
All of the events that follow, including the deaths of Luttrell’s teammates and those in a rescue helicopter that is shot down in trying to rescue them, flow from this one fateful decision. The goat herders did indeed report directly to the Teliban, who immediately started to hunt for the team. When the fight began, the odds were about twenty-five to one. The story of Luttrell’s fight for survival, the deaths of his comrades, his protection in an Afghan village and his eventual rescue are the stuff of an action adventure thriller, which I’m sure this will be someday.
In the end, I came to respect Marcus Luttrell and his compatriots. I don’t understand the drive to become a warrior, a person trained to kill people and break things. It saddens me to know that we need people like Marcus Luttrell in this world, but we do. And I’m grateful that he and his SEAL brothers are on the job. I came to understand that Marcus’s ranting about the liberal press, the Geneva Accords and the Rules of Engagement all come from that moment of decision when a morally correct choice caused the deaths of so many American soldiers. It’s a decision he now regrets. And he rants about these issues because in his world of right and wrong, good and evil, black and white, the rules that guide his behavior in war are often shaded in gray. Either decision made that fateful day in the Afghan mountains would have been moral or immoral depending on who was looking and what their point of view was. It appears that Marcus Luttrell will be tortured by the decision he made forever. But, had the decision been made to kill the goat herders, he might also be tortured by the memory of coldly killing two men and a boy high on that mountain in Afghanistan. And in the end, the result might have been the same.
All-in-all, the book is a good read and I recommend it.

The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey

Sun, 23 Nov 2008 21:06:39 -0500

Book Reviewed: The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey
Author(s): Candice Millard
Publisher: Broadway Books, New York
Copyright Date: 2005
ISBN-13: 978-0-7679-1373-7
Hard/Softcover: Softcover
Reviewed by: Yackman

Review: In the winter and spring of 1914, Theodore Roosevelt, after loosing a bid to become the first president elected from a third party, embarked on an ill conceived and poorly designed trip to explore unknown areas of the Brazilian Amazon rainforest. The trip, which nearly cost him his own life and did cost the lives of three of his men, was an epic of survival and endurance against overwhelming odds. Originally designed as a naturalist trip to collect specimens for the New York Museum of Natural History, the team quickly changed direction when the Brazilian Colonel Candido Mariono da Silva Rondon suggested they map the unexplored ‘River of Doubt”. Roosevelt jumped at the opportunity to step into the unknown and follow in the footsteps of the epic explorers he so much admired.
Quickly trimming his entourage of porters (known as camaradas) and less able explorers, Roosevelt and Randon, now co-leaders of the expedition, headed into the unknown. Roosevelt, too busy to attend to the initial planning of the trip, left those details to others whom he thought were knowledgeable about the requirements of such an undertaking. As a result, he did not know that the man who prepared the gear and supplies for the expedition, one Anthony Fiala, was a failed arctic explorer, with no experience in outfitting a tropical expedition. The result was disastrous.
Plagued with miles of rapids, faulty or inappropriate equipment and insufficient and inappropriate food supplies, the expedition forged on down the river, unable to penetrate an impenetrable rainforest. Always on the edge of starvation, surrounded by unseen but always present hostile Indians, plagued by hoards of biting insects, infested with parasites and sick with malaria and dysentery, the group pushed on through the months of February and March until finally contacting civilization again in April. By this time, Roosevelt was near death, one man had drowned, another had been murdered and a third, the murderer, abandoned to die in the jungle.
This fantastic true story, assembled into a rip-roaring yarn by the author from diaries of the participants and news accounts from the time, was an unexpectedly excellent nailbiter. I would highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys true adventure stories with a significant historical connection.