Lauren Redniss’ Oak Flat, Deborah Madison’s An Onion in My Pocket, Kermit Pattison’s Fossil Men, Peter Godfrey-Smith’s Metazoa, and Robert Macfarlane’s Ghostways all feature among November’s best reviewed science, technology, and nature books.
1. Oak Flat: A Fight for Sacred Land in the American West by Lauren Redniss
(Random House)
6 Rave
“Naelyn Pike, a skateboard aficionado and teenage Apache activist, arrived in Washington in 2013 to testify before Congress … She was speaking that day to a Senate subcommittee about the fate of Oak Flat, a vast plot of southeastern Arizona that is sacred to the San Carlos Apaches and lies above one of the largest known untapped veins of copper in the United States … Pike’s personal and political coming-of-age unfolds throughout Oak Flat, the masterly new illustrated book by the artist and writer Lauren Redniss, in which she follows the continuing fight between the San Carlos Apaches and Resolution Copper … Redniss weaves together the fraught history of copper extraction, along with Pike’s narrative and those of others in her community, into a brilliant assemblage of words and images. She pulls from an astonishing variety of sources: oral history, legal opinions, anthropological accounts, corporate news releases and careful, firsthand reporting, which she intersperses with her own vibrant and indelible colored-pencil sketches. The result is virtuosic.”
–Eliza Griswold (The New York Times Book Review)
2. An Onion in My Pocket: My Life with Vegetables by Deborah Madison
(Knopf)
1 Rave • 6 Positive
“The splendidly meandering narrative reads like a long dinner party with plenty of wine as Madison tells of cooking for M.F.K. Fisher’s birthday and working with Mark Miller, Richard Olney, David Tanis, Judy Rodgers and Waters, with whom she remains great friends … Madison’s personal account of the vegetarian movement, told in her gentle, engaging voice, is a collection of salient moments in a well-lived life.”
–Beth Dooley (The San Francisco Chronicle)
3. Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind by Kermit Pattison
(William Morrow)
2 Rave • 4 Positive
“… a work of staggering depth that brings us into the search for the oldest human … Pattison deftly weaves strands of science, sociology and political science into a compelling tale that stretches over decades. His discussions of scientific theories and phenomena are sophisticated enough for the expert yet clear and understandable to the novice … He spent more than five years researching the book, including several trips to the dig sites. The amount of material he juggles is astounding, yet he never loses the thread. His prose is lively and accessible, bringing to life topics that could be insufferably dry and dense in the wrong hands … Like any good mystery, Pattison’s tale is brimming with scoundrels, heroes, wrong turns and surprising twists. It’s an ambitious work that fully justifies the extraordinary effort that went into it, both by the fossil men and by the writer who chronicled their work.”
–John Reinan (The Star Tribune)
4. Metazoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind by Peter Godfrey-Smith
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
2 Rave • 3 Positive
“What makes this book shimmer and shine is Godfrey-Smith’s exploration of marine life (drawing on his vast and extensive diving knowledge and field experience) to illuminate the ways in which the animal mind works—and the thoughts and experiences that give it shape … He does this in vivid and scenic prose … The book is filled with riveting anecdotes and research, interspersed with charming and informative illustrations of various time periods such as the Ordovician (when plants first arrive on land) so we can imagine just for a moment what a sampling of inhabitants during that period looked like … Godfrey-Smith has an elegant and exacting way of urging along our curiosity by sharing his own questions about animal cognizance … But perhaps the most enthralling part of this book is the author’s experiences diving at famous sites now affectionately called Octopolis and Octlantis, just off the coast of eastern Australia … Metazoa brings an extraordinary and astute look at our own mind’s essential link to the animal world.”
–Aimee Nezhukumatathil (The New York Times Book Review)
5. Ghostways: Two Journeys in Unquiet Places by Robert Macfarlane, Stanley Donwood, and Dan Richards
(W. W. Norton & Company)
1 Rave • 3 Positive • 1 Mixed
“Contemplative, impressionistic and suffused with aspects of the mythic, these pieces operate at times like prose poems, and they return to a key setting of The Old Ways: the secret spaces of southern England, the flashpoints and the hidden paths … they offer not a guide so much as a set of glimpses, enhanced by Donwood’s vivid sketches, which resemble etchings in a fairy tale … At heart here is a sense of inference, or influence; the way the present is imbued with the past … a strangely lovely book, more complement than extension of Macfarlane’s work. But in their modesty, their open-endedness, these peregrinations recall to us that even the newest ground is also ancient.”
–David L. Ulin (The Los Angeles Times)
