Laboratory Earth: The Planetary Gamble We Can't Afford to Lose, Stephen Schneider, professor of biological sciences and senior fellow, Institute for International Studies, BasicBooks, 1996; $20 (environmental sciences)
More than 20 years ago, the author predicted that
global warming would become "demonstrable" by the turn of the century.
Now he revisits the debate he helped start. Distilling 25 years of
research, Schneider draws on several disciplines, including
biodiversity, geology, population growth and economic development, to
explain the environmental complexity of climate change. He derides the
media for reducing the issue to a battle between "doomsayers" and
"naysayers" and concludes that, left unchecked, human activity will
increase the earth's temperature from 2 to 8 degrees Celsius in the
next two centuries.
Is the book dead? That's
the question explored in this collection of 13 essays about the nature
of discourse in the digital era. In the introduction, Nunberg notes
that self-proclaimed "computer visionaries" speak of a future in which
printed books, brick-and- mortar libraries and traditional publishers
are superseded by their electronic counterparts. At the same time,
bibliophiles huff about the difficulty of curling up in bed with a
CyberMax PROMAX-5. The contributors here, professors from the United
States and Europe, steer a middle course. They're enthusiastic about
digital technologies but see change coming slowly. By the end of the
decade, Nunberg writes, all our current talk about the "end of the
book" will sound as dated and quaint as earlier predictions that
photography would kill painting and television would kill movies.
In 1991, Pamela Logan, a
research scientist in the aerospace industry, set out alone on an
expedition to find the Khampas. These fierce warriors from Eastern
Tibet had fought the invading Chinese from 1950 until the mid-70s when
they dispersed into the mountains. Logan, who holds a third-degree
black belt in Shokotan karate, traveled by foot, bike and horseback as
well as by train, bus and truck across frozen mountain passes and
desolate plains. On her nine-month expedition, funded by a grant from
Caltech, she visited Buddhist monasteries and met and worshiped with
monks and pilgrims. In the end, she caught only glimpses of the elusive
Khampa warriors, but her journey brought her a deeper understanding of
Tibetan Buddhism and enabled her to make a spiritual connection between
it and her martial arts training.
Did Lincoln make a
conditional offer to evacuate Fort Sumter in April 1861? Did he, just a
few days before his assassination, dream of a president lying dead in
the White House? To whom did he first reveal his intention to issue an
emancipation proclamation? Was his mother the illegitimate daughter of
a Virginia aristocrat? Like many great men of history, Lincoln is
remembered in both factual and fictional terms. This book attempts to
separate the wheat from the chaff. The husband and wife team sifted
through countless diaries, letters, newspaper interviews and
reminiscences. The authors document, classify and evaluate some 1,900
passages attributed to Lincoln by more than 500 people who claimed to
have heard the words directly from him. The result is both a collection
of quotations and an effort to evaluate the extent to which historians
rely on these resources.