Jamie Condliffe, contributor
Beyond the Blue Horizon, Brian Fagan's account of the first intrepid ocean-goers, contains jaw-dropping insights, but they get lost in a sea of repetition
THE oceans are swirling pools of contrast: calm and tumultuous; wine dark and clear; continuous yet disjointed; givers of life and grim reapers combined. For many people, such contrasts make the sea beguiling. There's a romance in the fickleness of water. Like a temperamental lover, its unpredictable behaviour and constant contrast make it all the more seductive.
To an extent, Brian Fagan's Beyond The Blue Horizon reads like the seas it seeks to describe: at once stirring and oddly flat. In it, Fagan sets out to cast light on the often overlooked early voyagers of our seas. The stories of Christopher Columbus and his ilk are well known, but the tales of ancient seafarers - from island-hopping Polynesians to the war-mongering Norse - have mostly been spared the limelight, until now.
Fascinating insights abound. Most prominent are the feats of engineering that allowed early ocean-going. From the Alaskan Tlingits' kayak construction using primitive tools and rudimentary steam treatments, to puffin-skin suits and seal-hide boots used by the Aleutians to keep out the North Pacific cold, the ingenious uses of materials amaze. The accounts of the navigational skills needed to land a craft on a tiny island in the middle of the Pacific without map or compass are nothing short of jaw-dropping.
Although such highlights fascinate, they do not make a book. When Fagan bemoans the fact that "the flavour, and sometimes the drama, is lost to history" for a particular coastline, one can't help but feel it is symptomatic of the whole text. The problem with writing about previously untold stories is, of course, finding fascinating content, and Fagan hasn't fished out quite enough.
Sadly, the book's structure compounds the problem. Fagan takes his analysis sea-by-sea. The result is repetitious: the reader endures countless retellings of trade-based motivations, abilities of early craft and ingenious yet recurring navigational tricks. A thematic or chronological approach might have made for a more compelling narrative.
While filled with engaging titbits, Beyond The Blue Horizon lacks the thread that would have made it a fascinating tour of ancient mariners. Ultimately, that makes it a compelling read for only the saltiest of sea dogs.
Book information
Beyond the Blue Horizon: How the earliest mariners unlocked the secrets of the oceans by Brian Fagan
Bloomsbury
?20/$28
Should we just let the Mississippi flood?
Michael Marshall, environment news reporter
THE fourth longest river in the world, the Mississippi is a sluggish but mighty beast. In The Big Muddy, historian Christopher Morris of the University of Texas at Arlington tells the river's story. His tale starts with the 16th-century Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto, the first European to cross the river, and extends to the recent catastrophes caused by Hurricane Katrina.
Morris's thesis is that European colonists failed to understand the river and surrounding wetlands. The Mississippi, he says, has to flood on a regular basis. Native Americans living there knew this so barely bothered to grow crops, which could be destroyed by floods. The rich wetlands gave them all the food they needed.
Rather than adapting to the Mississippi, colonists built ever-larger levees and barriers to stop it flooding. Morris argues that this has made the impact of the floods worse - society is no longer able to cope with them. When Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans in 2005, it hit a city that, despite being well below sea level, was completely unprepared for a severe flood. Surrounded by protective levees, people had forgotten how to cope.
Post-Katrina, some people are learning to live morecell in tune with the land and there is talk of dismantling some of the levees. It's an important story, but Morris's argument is weakened by his rather turgid storytelling. His extreme focus on the environmental science at the expense of the human stories mires what should be a fascinating tale of our over-ambitious battles against the forces of nature.
Book information
The Big Muddy by Christopher Morris
Oxford University Press
?22.50/$35
The simple cells that came before everything
Henry Nicholls
AS A species made up of eukaryotic cells complete with mitochondria, nuclei and other complex structures, it's easy for us Homo sapiens to look down on the far simpler prokaryotes, the cells of which lack such structures. But as palaeobiologist Martin Brasier of the University of Oxford explores the evolution of the complex cell, it becomes clear how much we owe to those simple prokaryotes.
Bursting with almost boyish enthusiasm, Brasier takes us on an adventure with lively vignettes from his career - among them, dredging up foraminifera in the Caribbean, spying lentil-like nummulites in the limestone at the foot of the Sphinx at Giza, and looking for the fossilised remains of the earliest known bacteria on the shores of Lake Superior.
Brasier's autobiographical forays are woven around bright episodes from the history of biology, or used to help bring complex concepts to life. In a particularly fine early chapter, Brasier is aboard a ship crossing the Sargasso Sea in the Atlantic and uses its layout - the engine room, bridge, sun deck, and labyrinthine corridors - as a metaphor to conjure an excellent introduction to the architecture of the complex cell.
He then introduces a spectacular array of prokaryotes, many of which team up with fellow simple-celled organisms in what he calls "biological consortia". Yet Brasier shows how such relationships were often short-lived, because changing environmental conditions severed ties and often resulted in mass extinction.
Until the "boring billion", that is. A surprisingly stable environment between 1 and 2 billion years ago gave these consortia time to flourish, Brasier contends. Microorganisms irreversibly engulfed one another, giving rise to the nucleus, mitochondria, chloroplasts and all the other "secret chambers" found in the eukaryote cell.
With this realisation, it's hard not to feel a greater respect for the humble prokaryote. After all, were it not for these simple cells, we wouldn't be here at all.
Book information
Secret Chambers: The hidden history of the cell by Martin Brasier
Oxford University Press
?16.99/$29.95
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