Today’s issue of Newsday has my review of Sea of Glory, Nathaniel Philbrick’s history of the first great scientific U.S. expedition. The review gets pretty harsh towards the end, despite the fact that the book is an exquisitely researched narrative of a fascinating subject. (What makes it particularly fascinating is that the expedition’s leader, Charles Wilkes, was practically insane.) It’s this very potential that got me so frustrated. Here’s a grand story about a journey to the ends of the Earth, about megalomaniacs, about the dawn of a great nation, about the birth of modern science, about the tragic dimension of empire, and yet Philbrick writes about all this in a style that’s maddeningly pedestrian and dutiful. At one point he tries to offer some penetrating psychological insight into Wilkes’s psyche by quoting from the pop-psychology book Emotional Intelligence. It was one of those moments when you have to tell yourself not to throw the book against the wall.
Category: Blog
By sheer coincidence (or some journalistic twist of fate) two magazine articles of mine are coming out this week, and they just so happen to make a nice neurological pairing.
They say that history is written by the winners, but if that’s true, then natural history is written by those who can write. Our ancestors split from the ancestors of chimpanzees some 6 or 7 million years ago, and since then they’ve given rise to perhaps twenty known species of hominids (and potentially many more waiting to be discovered). Today only our own species survives, and only ours has acquired the intelligence to learn things about the distant past–such as the fact that we are the product of evolution. Our survival and our intelligence sometimes blur together, with the result that a lot of the research on human evolution (and most of the popular accounts of it) revolve around what makes our own lineage unique and successful. All the other branches of hominid dynasty become our foil–the losers who, through their extinctions, reveal what is most glorious about ourselves. As a way of thinking, this is both unfair and foolish. We become satisfied with our own false assumptions about other hominids, and may miss some lessons they have for us. Exhibit A: our ancient thick-headed cousin Paranthropus.
I can already see the grim look many Americans will have as they chew on their Christmas roast tomorrow. They’ll be thinking about yesterday’s reportthat a cow in Washington state tested positive for mad cow disease. There’s some comfort in knowing that so far it’s just a single cow, and that American cattle are regularly screened for bovine spongiform encephalitis. The grimmest look this Christmas may be on the faces of McDonald’s shareholders and cattle ranchers. A single Canadian cow that test positive wreaked havoc on the entire beef industry up north. But this Christmas also brings a fascinating discovery about the bizarre agents that cause disorders such as mad cow disease: they may actually record our memories.