This week at the library: Chimpanzees, El Niño, and simple living

This week at the library I've been working through a lull, having finished my last Stack o' Books and having not yet gotten another one. My plans to fetch said stack were modified after I did a twelve-mile hike through hills on Saturday and consequently spent Sunday in bed watching episodes of The Office on DVD. Turns out I'm not as rough and ready as I thought.  I've been waiting for some books to arrive in the post;  one was ordered weeks ago from Georgia. I could walked over and gotten it by this point! Happily it arrived today. I've been biding my time reading a book on composting.  

In the last couple of weeks I’ve read two science books which won’t quite get full comments. The second was Frans de Waal’s Good-Natured, which concerns empathy in animals and  particularly chimpanzees. Considering how much of the book focuses on the same chimpanzees and topics covered in previous works, it’s somewhat redundant; throughout he argues that animals like elephants and chimpanzees are quite socially intelligent,  and delivers example after example to demonstrate how monkeys and chimpanzees act in anticipation of one another’s emotional states, motivated by personal attachment as well as selfish concern.  It’s eye-opening and wondrous if you’ve not read de Waal before, but…I have, and very recently. 

On a different note I read through Brian Fagan’s Floods, Famines, and Emperors, which first attributes the decline of various nation-states to El Niño periods. Considering that in dirt another scientist pinned the decline of some of the same nation-states on their used-up soil,  Flood is something of an example of specialists interpreting everything according to their unique focus. Midway he looks at the stresses climate change has put on historic nations in general, but that is done with more punch in Jared Diamond’s Collapse.  I much prefer the humility of dirt, which offered soil exhaustion as one source of decline, but not The One True Reason.  Fagan remains unique in the field of paleoclimatology, or archaeological meteorology, however.

Presently, I'm reading a delightful book on simple living, and anticipate receiving The Metropolitan Revolution through interlibrary loan shortly enough. Some reviews are in the works for Daily Life in Anglo-Saxon England and On Desire, the latter being nearly finished.  Daily Life took some getting into; the first chapter is a formidable treatment of sunken earth homes which even I couldn't take to. Happily after that there's trade, family life, and other such merriment.  Now that I've read about the Anglo-Saxons, I'm free to read The Vikings: can't put the cart before the warhorse!

So, after a busy weekend outdoors and in, the lull is passed and it's on for a few more interesting books. Happy reading, all!

This week at the library: Little Ice Age, and Bernard Cornwell

Last night I finished Battleflag, third in the Nathaniel Starbuck series. Seeing as I just finished and commented on Copperhead, posting extensive thoughts on Battleflag seemed redundant. Nate is still the son of a Boston abolitionist preacher fighting for the south to rebel against his father and his best friend Adam is following his conscience by a course that sets him against his own father, a southern aristocrat, and they're not even the most interesting characters in the book. What sets Battleflag apart is the sudden  and hilarious transformation of a contemptible slave-holding drunk who has a military office because of political favors into  a sympathetic character. I'd reveal more, but for spoilers. The ending is also brilliant, because it brings Nate into direct collision with his father, who is a major character as well. Daddy Starbuck's appearance makes Nate far more likable, because in spite of the abolitionist vein of his preaching, the Reverend Starbuck  is a decidedly unpleasant man to spend time with. The next, and so far final, book in the series is Antietam.

Before that, though, I read Brian Fagan's The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300-1850. It's an odd blend of history and science, and chronicles a long and weary succession of droughts, famines, plagues, and death. Small wonder the Calvinists subscribed to such a vicious god: if I'd lived through these years I'd start to think someone was out to get me, too.  Fagan doesn't try to make a case for the age being caused by one thing: although there are meteorological cycles to consider, the timespan was punctuated by volcano eruptions which didn't help things. The evidence Fagan uses ranges from the solid (weather records kept by farmers, monks, and the like) to the more dubious (changes in art, and the church's frequency of "Dear God in Heaven PLEASE STOP WITH THE PESTILENCE BIT" prayers), but Fagan clearly made pains to create a big picture understanding: the most notable illustration in the book is a two page map spread of Europe, which portrays the weather patterns for a particular month and includes references or evidence of the weather that at that time -- rain in Portugal, severe snow in Denmark, and so on.  All told, Little Ice Age proved an interesting read, illustrating  how quickly the weather can change and how severely it can effect human lives, something I'd hope we're starting to pick up on after the calamities of recent years.

I also finished James Howard Kunstler's Home from Nowhere, but it will merit its own post.

Note to self, stop buying books. Amazon delivers them more quickly than I can read them. I'm not kidding -- I ordered two books on Monday, figuring they'd be here in a week and a half to two weeks. In the meantime, I'd  chew over a couple of books at the library I've been interested in for a while now. But today, this morning, the books arrived. Now I have four new books waiting to be read in addition to my library books. Hmph. They are, for  the curious:

• Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. I waited for this book's release all last year. 
• Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time, Jeff Speck. This is also a new release, and by one of the authors of Suburban Nation, one of my top ten favorites of last year.
• Earth: An Intimate History, Richard Foley.  My second science read for the year, this time in geology.
• The Age of Steam, Thomas Crump. I bought this one to feed my hunger for trains, and then realized the library had a copy of Christian Wolmar's The Great Railroad Revolution. I don't want to binge, so this is low priority even though it also features a subject I'd like to find a book dedicated to, which is riverboats.

From the library, I have...

• Patterns of Home, a spin-off of Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language, which I intend to read one day if I find a copy that isn't priced so dearly.  The book examines elements of successful home construction, like proportion and sunlight management. 
• Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment , various authors including Robert Bellah. I'd intended for this to be my next serious read, but considering my interest in Antifragile, it may wait. 

The Great Journey

The Great Journey: Peopling the Americas
© 1987 Brian Fagan
288 pages

Fourth grade history was most memorable for me, for it was that year that we learned local history. Because Alabama was home to at least four native populations before the arrival of Europeans, we learned a bit about their cultures and I've had a lingering interest ever since. This book addresses how the first Americans arrived in the western hemisphere and how they lived. Fagan begins with European colonization and subsequent rising interest in how long people had lived in the "New World". He then tracks developing and diverging theories on how the Americas were "peopled", taking a break to caution the reader that there is still much we do not know. Half of the book is spent in "establishing" phase, but after that we follow the expansion of human populations across the continents -- although Fagan never makes the leap to Cuba. There's a lot of information here on how pre-city-dwelling people might have lived: Fagan writes at length on stoneworking, for instance, bringing to mind the Earth's Children series. Although there is a lot of information here that is quite interesting, I thought the book was somewhat...dry in parts. I suppose I've been spoiled by narratives, while this is more of a straightforward account.

Kingdoms of Gold, Kingdoms of Jade

Kingdoms of Gold, Kingdoms of Jade: the Americas Before Columbus
© 1991 Brian M. Fagan
240 pages, including 180 photographs set into the text

I've had a fascination with the Aztecs for most of my life, since I first saw pictures in second grade depicting their water-city Tenochtitlan. Growing up in Alabama, my fourth-grade history text also introduced me to the fascinating lifestyles of the various indigenous people living here before European colonization. As such, I looked forward to reading this, which I figured would deal heavily with the Aztecs, Maya, and Inca. My interest in getting a book by this particular author stems from a lecture he gave at my university a number of weeks back, in which he described the Mayan temples as both sacred places and ways to catch and channel water. Although the book does address the three cultures I expected, the book's scope is more broad than that and so Fagan does not go into a lot of detail -- there are many other cultures to visit.

Although he begins with brief chapters on the Aztecs and Incans, he quickly moves to the beginning of human settlements in the Americas. I'm hard-pressed to make sense of his organizational scheme: although writing on civilizations and cultures all over the Americas, he tends to move back and forth through time. The smaller cultures are not ignored in favor of the more memorable ones, an approach I grew to like. Although the information I was expecting was not in here -- the water-channelling rule of Mayan temples -- there is a wealth of information on the various cultures of the pre-Columbian Americas. Fagan writes on politics, agriculture, religion, symbolism, and history. He ends the book with a quick lecture on what the Americas gave the world in terms of foodstuffs and medicinal knowledge.

The book is well-written, provides ample pictures for illustration, and provides what I think is a generally good survey of the Americas. I enjoyed this book more than The Great Warming, at any rate, and will continue reading Fagan.

The Great Warming

The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations
© 2008 Brian Fagan
282 pages

Earlier this year, Dr. Brian M. Fagan visited my university to deliver a talk titled "Climate Change, the Flail of God, or the Elephant in the Room" in which he spoke on the effects of the "Medieval Warming Period" on societies then existing. Fagan elaborates in the book that while the "Medieval Warm" was a topic of discussion occasionally bandied about, there was little in the way of concrete evidence outside of oral history. He did find evidence to support such a theory, but more disturbing was the evidence of severe climactic disturbances elsewhere on the global -- perhaps different consequences of the same weather pattern. This book is -- as I've hinted -- a full elaboration of that brief lecture, and in fact answered a question I raised during the question and answer session that Fagan only answered half-heartedly then. The full title is Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations. Fagan is primarily concerned with the global consequences of the Medieval Warm period, and his chapters -- while beginning in sunny Europe, enjoying a climate far more conducive to being able to grow surplus food than ever before, take us to the Sahara, following Moorish caravans, eventually visiting every continent except Antarctica.

I read Collapse by Jared Diamond back in December, and this book reminded me of it in many ways. Both Fagan and Diamond examine the expanding reach of the Vikings and how settlers in Greenland struggled to survive in the harsh climate, eventually being cut off from Europe when the warm period ceased and vanishing all together. (My question to Fagan was if the warm period had affected Scandinavia to the point that surpluses had created a population boom, necessitating the Vikings attempting to make a living for themselves by trading with and sacking parts of Europe. That's a lot to fit into one question, so there's little wonder he misheard me then. The answer, according to the book, is yes. My suspicions were confirmed.) Diamond and Fagan both address the Mayan "implosion", although I will say that Fagan's coverage of the Maya was more exhaustive. In his lecture, Fagan told us how the Mayan temples were actually used to catch and channel water in additional to being tall and intimidating. Fagan covers more ground than Diamond, though,visiting places I've never heard of.

The theme of the book is how climate change alters human societies differently depending on where they live. While some societies -- the Europeans, for instance -- fared well during the warm period, severe and extended droughts and flooding periods in other parts of the world killed millions and in some cases dealt societies a staggering blow from which they would not recover. An observation of mine was of how vulnerable we are to droughts, flooding, and so on: we seem utterly at the mercy of the climate. My opinion of the book is mixed. While the information was interesting and generally presented well, it wasn't that strong of a narrative: it didn't grip me the way Diamond did. I'm going to read a little more Fagan to see if it was just this book, though.