Nola

I didn’t expect this book to be quite so personal or so much about the author’s relationship with his parents and their history. It did give quite a look at what life was like in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. I had heard in the news of the take-over of the white farms in Zimbabwe and the unbelievable inflation, but this book puts the news in terms of real peoples’ lives, even though mostly white peoples’ lives. Peter Godwin did some scary journalism to get the material for the book, and it is impressive that he worked with Jared Diamond. The writing is good, but sometimes the number of names was too overwhelming for me to follow.

What happened during the 1900 Galveston hurricane is told mostly through the U.S. Weather Bureau's weatherman in Galveston at the time, Isaac Cline. The intent is to show how the weather service was at fault for the terrible death toll in Galveston. The highest levels of the service so controlling that the word hurricane was not allowed. Isaac Cline himself claimed the physics of hurricanes allowed only occasional mild hurricanes as far west as Galveston.
For a book about real people, this book has constant assumptions about peoples' feelings that make me uneasy. The author did do a lot of research and his sources are all listed, with reasons for some of the assumptions, but they are too specific. The book starts out saying "On some nights, however, the children cried only long enough to wake him, and he would lie there heart-struck, wondering what had brought him back to the world at such an unaccustomed hour. Tonight that feeling returned. Most other nights, Isaac slept soundly." I am comfortable with this in a novel, but not in a non-fiction book.
The book jumps around between different time periods and different characters so much that the thread of the hurricane's development gets lost. On the other hand, this does give a sense of how the hurricane effected more than just 1 part of the city, and gives some perspective on historical hurricanes, but less would be better.
The history of how people learned the causes of hurricanes is some of the best parts of the book, along with some of the weird weather phenomena.
There are 2 maps at vastly different scales, but even more would help.

This book illustrates the amazing breadth of E.O. Wilson’s work. The format of an autobiography allows for inclusion of everything on which Wilson worked, thought, and collaborated. He tells how each of his ideas and studies was inspired and developed, and includes the context of the state of knowledge and politics of the times. He explains conflicts with other scientists that arose on many issues, with an uncanny ability to describe other people’s mannerisms. I had no idea that ecology and biology had been so controversial. Reading these personal stories behind developing ecological principles is a good way to make them memorable. There is really more to be gained from this book that can be absorbed in one reading.

Even though Wilson writes about his childhood, his father’s alcoholism emerges later as an afterthought. Another person might have written an entire book about their struggle to overcome that kind of early life, but instead Wilson’s focus is on his passion for biology and barely touches on what others might have seen as difficulties. His passion infused his early life with joy and his later life with unbelievable achievement.

Nice selection that shows the huge variety of mountaineering. It highlights both quite different places and climbing methods and mindsets that changed immensely over time. Of course, understanding the technical aspects and physical endurance are totally beyond me, so I don't have the appreciation for these stories that I might. They do get very scary, but I like having gained some slight sense of the past of this sport in Alaska.

Michio's photography is exquisite, and the text is also very good. There was one page where I didn't see the correlation between the text and photo, but that is a minor detail. This book gives you a deeper sense of what a grizzly bear is.

Of course, there are a lot of acronyms in this book - so many that they're hard to remember even after they're written out. Plus a lot of people to keep straight...The way that DARPA is run is interesting. I wouldn't know if the management style makes it better at what it does than other organizations are, but according to this book, it has a lot of accomplishments. I think those accomplishments could have been gone through at less length, and an organization chart for DARPA would have been helpful.

Here is a full story of an Alaska native leader, John Fredson, of whom I had never heard until reading Hudson Stuck's books. John Fredson didn't live that long ago, but life has changed immensely since his early years. The last part of the book has a great primer on the Indian Reorganization Act, which, while an important part of Alaskan governmental organization, was something I had never seen explained. In wolf Smeller, Clara MacKenzie takes you through the development of the act to its implementation. I had always heard that Venetie was different, but I didn't know that was because it had 1.4 million acres of land reserved for hunting and fishing for its people.

Since I had just read Hudson Stuck’s book The Ascent of Denali, I was very interested to find that this book tells more about Harry Karstens, who accompanied him in climbing Denali. At the end of the book, it turns out that Harry Karstens became the first superintendent of Mount McKinley National Park. It was quite sad to find out that he did not get along with Stuck after their ascent. This was never mentioned in Stuck’s book. It was even sadder to find in the appendix that Walter Harper, who was the first person on the summit of Denali, died when the Princess Sophia went down. Walter Harper was half Athabascan, and he had wanted to become a doctor. He had just married and he and his wife were traveling to the college he was going to attend. This book also described some other interesting characters in the Denali-Kantishna area, but it could have used more editing. At times there were too many people to keep up with and extensive use of quotes instead of summarizing bogged the book down. I did learn who the major players were and what the major issues were when the park was formed. Also, I learned a bit about the background of the game laws, which really interested me. I keep finding myself wondering why we have the game laws we do, so I appreciate the early perspective from this book. Kantishna obviously required a lot of research. It has some good photographs and a good notes and bibliography section.

It is embarrassing to say that I did not know who first climbed Denali before reading this book. Now I do, and it's complicated. During the 1910's, there was a lot of interest in climbing this mountain. The Ascent of Denali tells about at least two of the other expeditions in the previous two years, one of which missed the summit by merely a few hundred feet, and the other one which did summit the lower North Peak, but, because of the actions of one of their members, had not been believed.
The people on the expedition were the author, Hudson Stuck, Harry Karstens, Walter Harper, and Robert Tatum, the last two both 21. There were also two 14 or 15 year-old native boys who helped establish and maintain the base camp, but did not climb the mountain. All but Tatum had been living and traveling in Alaska, and were used to the extreme cold.
This expedition was well-planned and still hellishly difficult. The first problem was the break-down of the boat they planned to use to take their supplies into the Denali area. (Back then, people climbing Denali apparently didn't take helicopters from Talketna.) Then half the climbing supplies ordered from the east coast (in February for a trip in March of the following year) never showed up, and the ice axes were little toy ice axes. New York did not have crampons at all. So they had to have ice axes, crampons, and silk tents made in Fairbanks. They had a fire on their way up that destroyed a significant part of their supplies, including their silk tents. Worst of all was their discovery that an earthquake that occurred immediately after one of the previous expeditions had turned back had ruined several miles of the ridge they were to climb by taking large chunks out of it and leaving some of the ice balanced as large ice blocks. Hudson said they pushed one of these the size of a two-story house off the ridge two thousand feet onto the glacier below. It took them three weeks to get up this ridge by the slow dangerous process of cutting steps that would make it passable.
Other than unexpected problems and the expected, but still terrible cold, I found it interesting that they used dog sleds until they had crossed the first glacier on the mountain, that they used their dogs to haul firewood in stages to their camps, that they made the entire climb in moccasins that they tied crampons to, and that they prepared their pemmican themselves at their base camp from game they shot. Not at all the kind of climbing that you hear about now.

The author sounds like someone it would be wonderful to meet and spend time with, as Jim King described doing in his book, Attending Alaska's Birds. A Naturalist in Alaska is purely a book of wildlife observations. There were no huge revelations in it, but I hope I learned incrementally, much like one would if they were spending hours and days watching wildlife. The author very modestly says nothing about any physical hardship that he underwent during his work, nothing about how difficult it was, or the amount of base knowledge he must certainly have had to bring to it. The drawings are delightful. I would have benefited from having some maps, even hand-drawn ones, included.

It was a shock to find out what a huge tragedy the Princess Sofia was. Some of the book seemed a little lengthy, but it was certainly worthwhile to learn what happened after the Sofia was grounded and why it wasn't possible to save the hundreds of people on it. Having read this has made the Princess Sofia more than a vague concept to me.

I loved the movie Smoke Signals and I enjoyed these stories.

In this book Desowitz goes over the evidence for the origin and history of several diseases, including malaria, worm infestations, yellow fever, and syphylis, of which there are actually four different kinds. I didn't know anything about hookworm, and had never heard of John Rockefeller's campaign against hookworm in the southern United States. Rockefeffer's foundation also had a campaign against yellow fever, which apparently succeeded by inplementing simple mosquito control measures. But malaria, which I didn't know ever even existed in the US, lasted much longer here, up until World War II. As usual,Desowitz covers a lot of ground, and I found myself having to go back and look up things I had remembered wrong or not at all.

I read this book a long time ago. Now my son's girlfriend and her son are moving out to Sunny Point where Mary Lou and Jim King still live and where this story took place. I wanted to get the book for the boy so he would know about the place they are moving too. Unfortunately, I found that it is out of print, so I had to check it out from the library. Of course, I read it again before passing it on.
Koog and Tina is a children's book, but wonderful for adults, too. It tells the true story of a permanently injured swan who was cared for by Jim and Mary Lou King and their children. This book's focus on one bird and his mate beautifully exemplifies the character of swans. Facts about North American swan history and numbers are presented as background, but painlessly on just a few pages with good graphics. The book includes the antics of other birds, including geese, at the King's home and in the surrounding wetlands. The real meat of the book, however, is the story of Koog's life and how it intertwined with that of his mate, Tina, a swan of another species and with the King's and their children as they grew up. It is a well-written story, very touching, and told from a wealth of knowledge, empathy, and humor.

There is a type of complete colorblindness, achromatopsia, where people do not have functional cones in their eyes and are almost blind in sunlight because of the sensitivity of the rods. Achromatopsia, unlike red-green colorblindness, is very rare. The island of Fuur and the island of Pingelap both had large numbers of people suffering from this congenital achromatopsia. Only Pingelap, in the south Pacific, still has large numbers of achromatopes. The author visited Pingelap with a physiologist who is an achromatope himself and a friend who is an ophthalmologist. He writes a pretty interesting travel biography of their trip in addition to talking about the examinations and interviews with the achromatopes and how such large numbers of them cope with limited vision. He has a strong interest in their compensations and alternate ways of perceiving the world. Achromatopes may have an advantage in such things as night diving to capture fish because of their dark vision is strong.
The second part of the book is about traveling to the island of Guam to visit a colleague who treats neurological disorders. This colleague, Dr. John Steele, wants the author to see the cases of lytico and bodig, which are prevalent in Guam. Dr. Steele has been treating and looking for reasons for lytico and bodig and these diseases have symptoms similar to those of patients the author treats for post-encephalitic disorders. Both lytico and bodig, while declining, are believed to have had the same cause sometime in the past on Guam. The candidates are explained with pros and cons for each and there is discussion of similar diseases in other places.

Several different and quite exciting trips by dogsled are described in this book. Hudson Stuck must have been very capable to do the traveling he did, and then taking the effort to write about it. All the trips were very strenuous and extremely dangerous in places. This is the earliest description I had read yet of Alaska. It is fascinating to see which places were populated at that time, and why. The author's description of the different native groups at that time is also very interesting. So is the description of the land, especially since my contact with them is mostly by the couple of roads that go across the state and tends to be unrelated to landforms. Stuck, on the other hand, thinks only in terms of landforms. It would have been very helpful to have a map included in the book, but there are photos!
Stuck was very concerned with the welfare of the natives and had a very progressive attitude toward them. However, some of the language in the book is obviously from that time period and is downright peculiar now. The phrasing also seems to be old-fashioned, and it is sometimes takes a bit of effort to follow sentences that I would have structured differently.
The first trip was 4 and 1/2 months during the winter of 1905-06 and went from Fairbanks to Circle, Fort Yukon, Bettles, Coldfoot, Kotzebue Sound, Nome and back to Fairbanks. A short trip 3 years later is next. This one was very unplanned and dangerous, It included description of passing over flexible river ice with the ice being held up by the water underneath it. The third trip in the winter of 1909-10 was from Fort Yukon to Allakaket, Tanana, Rampart City, Nenana, Chena, Fairbanks, Salchaket, Eagle, Circle, and back to Fort Yukon during a very severe winter. The next trip in the winter of 1910-11 is from Tanana to Ididarod and to Fort Yukon.
The difficulties of travel by dog sled, camping out at night are well explained, although doing anything at 50 below zero is still unimaginable to me. Two in the Far North described the same type of travel, but with less detail. Just when I was wishing I had some idea of what kind of meals they had, I came to a section of the book where Stuck described preparation of a typical meal.
Hudson Stuck was the Archdeacon of the Yukon, and he traveled to visit missions. The travel he did was extensive and covered many totally different climatic and ethnic areas. Most of the travel routes in winter are along rivers, with portages to cut across river bends and to pass between different drainages. I don't think any of them were actual roads, and may not have been summer trails.
The book includes very recent stories of epidemics in native villages. The last trip is through territory that the author believes is very sparsely populated, even for early Alaska, because of diphtheria in 1905 and measles in 1900. He describes three locations with six, six and sixteen people each and stories he heard there of entire villages being killed by disease.
Now on to the book he wrote about his first ascent of Denali. I can hardly wait.