A Medieval Bestiary: When a book breaks your heart

Posted on September 20, 2012 by admin

A Medieval Bestiary. Published by eBook Treasures. iPad. £4.99

Reviewed by Maggie Koerth-Baker

A Medieval Bestiary is just not that into me.

We should have gone so well together. It was a scanned copy of The Royal Bestiary, a 13th century manuscript stored in the British Library, enhanced for the iPad with text and audio interpretation on every page. I was a giant nerd. Clearly, a match made in heaven.

But I don't think it's going to work out.

It's not that the book is terrible. In fact, parts of it are, objectively, pretty damn cool. We are, after all, talking about an opportunity to virtually thumb through the pages of a very old book. And the scans are excellent. You can see stains on the vellum, and the margin lines drawn by the scribe or illustrator to make certain that text and images were put into just the right place on every page. You can zoom in on the beautiful, colored and gilded drawings of bees and eagles, lions and centuars. On every page, there is, indeed, a little tab that you can tap to learn more about the animals you see in the pictures – especially helpful for the book's many imaginary animals, such as the leucrota. Leucrotas, you may be interested to know, happen when a male hyena mates with a female lion. The result of that partnership looks, for some reason, rather like a horse, but with a forked tail and a creepy, Jack Nicholson smile. The Medieval Bestiary assures me that the leucrota's "teeth" are actually a single piece of sharp bone, curved into a U shape. If I tap the "Listen" button, this information will be read to me by a soothing, female, British voice.

In short, A Medieval Bestiary does everything it promised to do. In fact, I'm sure this book could make somebody very happy. (Maybe an art student?) Just not me. That's because, while it does do everything it promised, A Medieval Bestiary does only that. And not a bit more. I, unfortunately, need the bit more.

The truth is that some of this is my fault. I read the description and then set my expectations rather higher than I should have. I can't really blame A Medieval Bestiary for being the book it is (and said it was) rather than the book I want to be. And yet. And yet.

A book like this needs context. I need to know about the genre of bestiaries, in general. Did the authors make up the clearly made-up animals (and the clearly made-up information about real animals)? Or were they writing down longstanding traditions? What was the point of the book? Am I supposed to be studying the natural world, or exploring my own morality? Do books like bestiaries have a role in the development of true taxonomy and biology, the same way that alchemy had a role in the development of chemistry and physics? I have no idea. Because A Medieval Bestiary doesn't tell me. In fact, I had to run a couple Google searches to even figure out the book's real name. This is the full extent of context it offers on itself:

A bestiary is a book of real and imaginary beasts, though its subjects can extend to plants and even rocks. It combines description of the physical nature and habits of animals with elaboration on the moral or spiritual significance of these characteristics.

This amazing book was produced in the first decade of the 13th century, and is one of the earliest bestiaries to feature vivid paintings of animals. They are set on gold grounds and in colourful frames, supplanting the line-drawn renderings that populated earlier bestiaries. These lavish illuminations would have made this a costly book to produce, and so it is likely that it was produced for an aristocratic, or even royal, owner who could read Latin or had a chaplain who could do so.

Even more frustrating was the interpretation within the book. A Medieval Bestiary is in Latin (and written in that sort of fancy medieval font that makes it difficult to read even if you do know Latin). But there is no translation of the actual text. The interpretation merely describes the illustrations. In some cases (but not all) that includes a summary of the text around the image, but even then that's almost worse, because what you get are stunted plot points of a story that probably would have been a lot more interesting to read for itself.

Basically, I look at A Medieval Bestiary and think of all that it could be, but isn't. Particularly with the iPad book format, there's such an opportunity here to add lots of context: History, philosphy, quotes and links to other works. Done right, a reader could come away from this understanding more about medieval society as a whole and the development of science from magical/religious art to rational tool. Instead, A Medieval Bestiary just wants to tell you what's going on in the pictures. There's nothing wrong with that. But I'm too old and too wise to waste much time thinking I can change a book into something it's not.

Besides, in the course of breaking up with it, I discovered that A Medieval Bestiary had been kind of misleading me all along. I paid the equivalent of $8 for this book (I was offered a free review code, but couldn't figure out where to apply it during the ordering process). But, turns out, this isn't exactly unique content. In fact, the whole thing is available as free PDFs on the website of the Royal Library. Some of the scanned pages there even come with the exact same interpretation as is offered in the iPad version. Which just kind of serves to make the shortcomings of the iPad book that much more apparent. I don't mind paying $8 for something really cool. I mind paying $8 for an iPad version of something I can get for free as a PDF. If the publishers – eBook Treasures – were going to convert A Medieval Bestiary to iPad, why not take advantage of that and do some stuff that you couldn't do with PDFs?

Sadly, I think it's time this book and I went our separate ways. Hopefully, we can still be friends. And, who knows, maybe in the future, when A Medieval Bestiary has had some time to grow, we can rekindle the relationship.

The British Library: Books of Beasts in the British Library: the Medieval Bestiary and its context (the book published on iPad as A Medieval Bestiary is listed here as Royal 12 C. xix)

Explore and learn more about medieval bestiaries as a genre at The Medieval Bestiary website (not affiliated with eBook Treasures or the iPad version of The Royal Bestiary)

Image: An illustration from the The Royal Bestiary, depicting a unicorn laying its head on the lap of a lady. Presumably, the illustrator had never seen a unicorn, nor (one suspects) a lady.

Maggie Koerth-Baker is the science editor at BoingBoing.net, the science columnist at The New York Times Magazine, and the author of Before the Lights Go Out.

Interplanetary Cuisine

Posted on August 14, 2012 by Carl Zimmer

Space Nutrition, by Scott M. Smith, Janis Davis-Street, Lisa Neasbitt & Sara R. Zwart. Published by NASA Nutritional Biochemistry Laboratory. iPad (iBooks 2 and iOS5 required), free.

Reviewed by Veronique Greenwood

A couple of months ago, I attended a trade show for the processed food industry. There, wandering among booths hawking hydrolyzed vegetable protein, phosphate, and guar gum, I learned that despite its implication in the obesity epidemic, the processed food industry views itself as a direct descendant of Louis Pasteur and his pasteurization process—a provider of safe food for millions. This was profoundly unsettling, and I was relieved when I happened across a pair of NASA food scientists standing before a poster. In space, how food is preserved and packaged isn’t a matter of merchandizing. It is still, as in the days of Pasteur, a matter of survival.

This thesis and the science you need to know to understand it are presented in Space Nutrition, a free ebook put together by members of NASA’s Nutritional Biochemistry Laboratory. Though it makes extremely limited use of multimedia (warning: it only functions in the landscape orientation), Space Nutrition is a passable introduction to the special difficulties of getting a balanced diet in space, where bone loss is a given, nutrients are absorbed differently than on Earth, and everything must have a long shelf life. Perhaps more importantly, it's a window into the enthusiasms and curiosity of the scientists who wrote it.

The book, which is pitched at children grades 5-8, grew out of a long-running space nutrition newsletter [pdf], and this heritage may be responsible for its poor organization. There are sections, for example, called “Space Food” and “Space Flight Research” in the chapter called Nutrition, but the chapter called Space Flight Nutrition has only one section, entitled “Being Healthy is not Just About Nutrition (even though we like to think it is!)” (caps theirs). Frustratingly, the details of how space flight affects the human body and the nutrients in food are never enumerated in one place. This hampers its usefulness as a primer.

But for me, and I suspect for any kids reading it, the book's primary charm is in the photographs and asides that you can’t find in a Wikipedia article on the subject. One photogallery is full of snapshots taken by excited Nutritional Biochemistry Lab members as they drive to Kennedy Space Center to pick up astronaut blood samples from the ISS, which they use to determine the effects of space flight on nutrient absorption, bones, and muscles. The shots of the Experiment Payload truck that retrieves the samples and of the little blue NASA duffel bags they are carried home in give the process of space research a refreshing physicality.

And spaceflight seen from a food scientist's point of view is endearingly kooky. Crumbs are a big no-no for space foods—they fly around and clog the instruments. Tortillas that last almost a year, on the other hand, are a very exciting development, the authors write, because you would need three hands to make a traditional sandwich with two slices of bread and a slice of baloney in space. The book's history of manned spaceflight missions reads like no other you'll find. Gemini: Shrimp cocktail, chicken and vegetables, pudding, applesauce. Apollo: bread slices, cheddar cheese spread, frankfurters, fruit juice. Skylab: steak, vanilla ice cream.

These colorful details, at least for me, don't quite make up for the organizational problems. But the book is free, and if you or your kid are interested in space flight or astronaut food, it's certainly worth downloading.

The book also raises the hope, however faint, that perhaps someday we will seek to turn the considerable power of food science not towards making potato chips fly off the shelves, or devising yet more uses for soy protein, but towards getting humans on other planets.

Veronique Greenwood is a staff writer at DISCOVER Magazine. She writes about everything from caffeine chemistry to cold cures to Jelly Belly flavors, and her work has appeared in Scientific American, TIME.com, TheAtlantic.com, and others. Follow her on Twitter here.

The Science of Sports: An eBook Goes for the Gold, Gets A Bronze

Posted on July 30, 2012 by Carl Zimmer

The Science of Sports: Winning in the Olympics. Scientific American $3.99 Kindle, iBook, Nook, Sony Reader

Guest review by Jaime Green

I love the Olympics, although I'm not sure why. Maybe it's the special-occasion feel, or the every-two-years anticipation–a longer wait than for next Christmas. (I do remember when both summer and winter games were held in the same year, though not well enough to recall whether the four-year wait heightened the thrill or if the crush of excitement was too much, gymnastics and archery only six months from figure luge and ski jump.)

The exotic sports at the Olympics also add to its thrill. Sure, people will snark about the two weeks a year we care about synchronized diving –“Where were you during world championships last year!?”–but for those two weeks we do care! We cram our brains with obscure knowledge. Every four winters we learn about triple axels and the salchow–how the heck to spell salchow–and then we let it all go dormant for the next four years, until we can debate the finer points of fencing again.

It's this thrill of the unusual, and of learning its finer points, that I was looking for in Scientific American's ebook, The Science of Sports: Winning in the Olympics. And coming into it looking for that angle, I was disappointed that the book stayed so true to the first part of its title: the science of sports. That's what this ebook is full of. What it is not full of, and what I missed, was the science of the Olympics.

This first ebook from the editors of Scientific American reads much more like a collection of articles than a single work, and as such it is a perfectly serviceable survey on the science of sports. Pieces are divided into eight sections: The Psychology of Winning, Pushing Human Limits, Drugs and Doping, Concussions, Comeback from Injury, Gear that Gives an Edge, Fitness: Expert Advice for You, and Closing Ceremonies. The pieces, written especially for this ebook by individual Scientific American editors and contributors, explore the physiology, biochemistry, and neurobiology of sports. They also examine recent incidents, such as doping scandals, that bring science and sports together in less savory ways.

Although the lack of unity was sometimes frustrating on a straight-through read–back-to-back articles sometimes retread each other's ground, re-explaining a concept or re-defining a blood protein–it still makes for a nice collection to pick your way through. There's no need to read in order, so you can follow your interests, from the mental acuity of an elite athlete to the most common Olympic injuries and then over to how playing sports can boost children's brain power. You'll learn something cool whichever path you take. And there's a lot to learn. Even if you didn't need this ebook to teach you that the ACL isn't the Achilles tendon but is actually in the knee, there is satisfyingly deep discussion of topics ranging from psychology to blood doping to the physics of prosthetic legs.

The questions tackled in this ebook go beyond the science of sports, too, in several cases engaging with the ethical questions that scientific advances raise. Do steroids make better athletes, or do they make cheaters? How many restrictions should be put on young athletes to protect their brains from concussions? Where does an athlete find the balance between improved performance and dangerously low body fat? These questions make interesting food for thought, and perhaps also foundations for important decisions. The ramifications extend far beyond the Olympic arenas.

Yet I still wished this ebook spent more time within those Olympic arenas. Many pieces focus surprisingly squarely on the topic of the ebook's subtitle: winning. It's as if the ebook's authors decided that Olympic equals elite, and then just wrote about how elite athletes win. But I don't care if Michael Phelps gets the gold. I care that he is stunning to watch. (In the pool, I mean.) And I want to know the science behind his performance–of something that feels specifically, uniquely Olympic. Articles that focused on baseball and American football felt similarly dissatisfying. They're sports, yes, but hardly what we think of as Olympic sports. (In fact, now that baseball's been dropped from the games, neither is an Olympic sport.) For readers drawn to this ebook for the Olympics and not for the sports, this may be a disappointment.

Also potentially disappointing–or virulently frustrating, depending on your level of investment–are some gaps in the scientific and athletic arguments. Jesse Bering's piece, “Why We Love Sports: Success of the Fittest,” proposes that sports compel us as fans and spectators because they serve as a demonstration of reproductive prowess. (Think of football as the peacock tail-feathers of our species.) This argument itself is a stretch. Sports audiences are so dramatically weighted toward men who are not looking to the field for mates. Bering doesn't even give the plausible counterarguments lip service. What about the primal need for play? Tribal affiliations and the strengthening power of us vs. them? The evolution and ritualization of hunting and combat practice? Heck, maybe even mirror neurons, who knows?

In a piece called “Does Exercise Really Make You Stronger?” Coco Ballantyne asserts that “the longer, harder and more often you exercise, the greater the health benefits.” She fails to offer the important caveat against overtraining, which plagues professional and devoted amateur athletes alike, with increased risk of injuries and often dramatic negative effects from overstressing the body. An article on preventing shin splints was similarly narrow-sighted, failing to mention the calf-strengthening exercises that have saved the shins of every new runner I know.

The highlights of the book examined the subjects that I, and most readers, have no experience with. The articles on top-level cyclists and swimmers, on Olympic runner Oscar Pistorious' prosthetic legs, drew me in much more and carried that charge of the slightly esoteric that make me love the Olympics. Even an article on advanced swim gear brought a little frisson of elite, advanced technology. And “Who Wins the 40-Yard Dash: Squirrel, Elephant, Pig, Human?” armed me for some fun small-talk to fill the breaks between track and field events over the next two weeks.

For the most part, though, the science here is decidedly pedestrian. Readers who want to learn about the geometry of a rhythmic gymnast's twirling ribbon or how a pentathlete slows her heart rate before she shoots will have to wait. Maybe there will be something for us in another four years.

Jaime Green is a graduate student in Columbia's MFA writing program. Her work has appeared in The Awl, Spezzatino, The Hairpin, and Parabasis. She is writing a book about the possibility of life in the universe.

A Journey to the Island of Tree Kangaroos

Posted on June 15, 2012 by Carl Zimmer

The Island of Secrets, by Matthew Power. Published by the Atavist. $1.99 – $2.99. iPad and iPhone version available through the Atavist app. Kindle, Nook. More information available from The Atavist.

Guest reviewed by Oliver Hulland

Matthew Power is the kind of writer everyone dreams of becoming. In the vein of John McPhee and Paul Theroux, Power writes about exotic far-away places, not from second-hand accounts but instead from personal experience. The cuts, bruises, insect bites, and close encounters he records are just as likely to be his own as the adventurers he profiles.

The Island of Secrets is Power's most recent attempt to understand the indomitable urge to explore. We find ourselves thrust into the world of John Lane, a California scientist who looks for fossils in caves and who had accidentally discovered a new species of tree kangaroo on the side of the road while on an expedition in New Britain, an island off the coast of New Guinea. Upon learning of its novelty he later returned for the specimen only to find that it had, to his dismay, been eaten. And so Lane, with Power in tow, mounted another expedition to rediscover the kangaroo he believes holds the key to preserving what's left of the island's vanishing forests.

The Island of Secrets reads like a twenty-first-century explorer's diary, rich with multimedia content documenting an expedition deep into New Britain's jungles. Inline links pop open locations on maps, historical factoids, or images from Power's trip. The intimate photos provide a glimpse into the day-to-day life of the haphazard expedition, including shots of an impromptu shoddily-made raft, the science team's dilapidated jungle base camp, and the odd detail like a local's "Calvin Klain" underwear.

While the quality of the photographs are nothing like those found in glossy magazines, they serve as evidence of the journalistic process, and of the realities of Power's research in New Britain. Even better than the photographs, though, are the small video clips that are peppered throughout the text. One clip records a slapdash attempt to sew shut a careless machete wound, while another shows the slow, laborious process of hacking through the dense Tanglefoot fern underbrush. These short clips are the antithesis of slick BBC nature documentaries, and as a result they succeed in providing gritty, blurry proof of the day-to-day struggle of science in far-away places.

Along with the text, The Atavist app also includes a superbly produced audiobook version, ready by Power himself. You can also listen to snippets of sounds from the jungle including the whirring of cicadas or samples of the local language, Tok Pisin. Some may find these audio-visual elements distracting or unnecessary (notably the looped chirping crickets that function as a soundtrack), more often than not they work in concert to create one of the richest media experiences available on an iPad or iPhone.

None of this would work, however, if it weren't for Power's talent in telling the story of John Lane's obsession with finding the tree kangaroo. By building off the foundation of a good story, The Atavist’s adaptation of The Island of Secrets creates a hybrid of narrative nonfiction that succeeds in bringing the journalistic and scientific process to life.

Oliver Hulland is the editor of Cool Tools, a site dedicated to finding tools that really work. When not reviewing tools, he can be found foraging for mushrooms, exploring caves, and applying to medical school.

The Frankenstein Universe: How The New York Public Library Blew Up the Ebook

Posted on June 8, 2012 by Carl Zimmer

Frankenstein: The Afterlife of Shelley's Circle. The New York Public Library. Web site. iPad app. Free.

Reviewed by Carl Zimmer

"Reviewed" is too generous a term for this post. If I set out to write a proper review this colossal labyrinth of an ebook, you would have to wait for weeks, perhaps months, for my verdict. But since this particular work is free, I think the most that's necessary is to point you in its direction and wish you well. I downloaded Frankenstein this morning, and I've been enjoying perusing it greatly. While it's not a perfect ebook, I expect I'll be delving back into it for a long while.

Frankenstein comes to us from the New York Public Library. If you've ever been there, you've probably seen one of their impressive exhibits. As one of the greatest libraries in the world, the New York Public Library is also a great literary museum. To put on an exhibit, they will typically select some of the finest treasures from their collections, such as rare books, letters, maps, and prints. Frankenstein is like an exploded version of one of their exhibits. It's drawn from the Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle. As I wandered through the app, I sometimes wonder if there was anything in the collection that they didn't include in it.

At the core of this ebook is Mary Shelley's classic meditation on science and humanity's urge towards creation. Here you can listen to a dramatic reading from one chapter. The ebook contains accounts of the making of novel, as well as its reception. Essayists contemplate the powerful hold the story has had on us ever since, and how we've adapted its themes to science's progress, from the advent of nuclear weapons to our age of stem cell manipulations and genetic engineering. The whole project is lavishly illustrated with paintings and photographs.

This morning on the ArtsBeat blog at the New York Times, Jennifer Schuessler wrote that "the app spins out widely and wildly." I have to agree with her. I found myself paging through stills from a disastrous 1981 Broadway production of Frankenstein that closed after one night, and asked myself, "Why am I looking at this?" I can't say that the experience gave me any insight into the book's place in our culture. The essays on Shelley's circle of friends veer off far from her novel. The app includes not one but two graphic novels. Frankenstein is also loaded with interactive features, which are nicely integrated technologicaly, but not thematically. While reading the piece on the making of the novel, you are invited to pop out a poll: "Do you get the most inspiration from creating on your own?" Why, yes I do! The app then informed me that 84% of the 13 people who voted agree with me. How 'bout them apples?

The ebook also has some technical flaws. I'm still clinging to my iPad 1, and I find that Frankenstein slows down its performance like no other ebook I've used. On more than one occasion, it even crashed. Which is odd, given that Frankenstein deals mainly in texts and pictures, which should make pretty modest demands on a tablet device. On top of the app's slow performance, it displays its essays in small windows that you have to scroll through, which took me back to the early days of the web. Sometimes when you follow a link, the app dumps you into the web-site version, as if you've fallen into a parallel universe.

If you find yourself annoyed by anything in Frankenstein, bear two things in mind. 1. It's free. 2. One touch of the screen will quickly take you to a different part of the app. Any time I've gotten bored by something in Frankenstein, I've found myself intrigued seconds later by one of the hundreds of elements of this app.

Perhaps that's the true sign of the greatness of Shelley's novel. The book was a Big Bang, and the universe it created is still expanding.

Zimmer author photo square Carl Zimmer writes frequently about science for the New York Times and is the author of 13 books, including A Planet of Viruses