lorax's 2011 nonfiction

It's easy for non-fiction readers to lose each other in the vastness of the 75 book challenge, so I'll be reposting here about the non-fiction books that I read (about half of my total reading). I'm counting memoirs and autobiography as nonfiction despite the grey intermediate area that they occupy.

1. At the Water's Edge by Carl Zimmer (1/03/11)
2. Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street by Michael Davis (1/06/11)
3. Travels with a Tangerine by Tim Mackintosh-Smith (1/11/11)
4. Club George: Diary of a Central Park Birdwatcher by Bob Levy (1/13/11)
5. Nothing to Envy by Barbara Demick (1/19/11)
6. A View from Lazy Point by Carl Safina (1/26/11)
7. Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes (2/01/11)
8. In the Land of Invented Languages (2/04/11)
9. A Dangerous Place by Marc Reisner (2/15/11)
10. Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin (2/24/11)
11. How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less by Sarah Glidden (2/27/11)
12. Why Buildings Stand Up by Mario Salvadori (2/28/11)
13. The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester (3/08/11)
14. The Millennium Problems by Keith Devlin (3/10/11)
15. A Fish Caught in Time by Samantha Weinberg (3/18/11)
16. Take Time for Paradise by A. Bartlett Giamatti (3/22/11)
17. Maybe I'll Pitch Forever by Satchel Paige (3/23/11)
18. Ask for It by Linda Babcock (3/27/11)
19. Of a Feather by Scott Weidensaul (3/29/11)
20. I Want to be Left Behind by Brenda Peterson (4/03/11)
21. Tulipomania by Mike Dash (4/05/11)
23. Burma Chronicles by Guy Delisle (reread) (4/10/11)
24. The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson (4/11/11)
25. Stonewall by Martin Duberman (4/19/11)
26. National Geographic Bird Coloration by Geoffrey Hill (4/19/11)
27. One Good Turn by Witold Rybczynski (4/20/11)
28. The Mayor of Castro Street by Randy Shilts (4/27/11)
29. The Last Speakers by David Harrison (5/3/11)
30. The Nothing that Is by Robert Kaplan (5/5/11)

At the Water's Edge by Carl Zimmer



The very long subtitle of At the Water's Edge ("Fish with fingers, whales with legs, and how life came ashore but then went back to sea") is a pretty reasonable synopsis of the book. I mostly picked it up for the second half, about the evolutionary history of whales; I'd had a one-sentence cartoon explanation in my head "Whales were descended from terrestrial carnivores that went back to sea, and there was this wonderfully named creature called Basilosaurus involved", and I wanted some more details. The first section proved surprisingly interesting as well, not as much for the specifics of how terrestrial vertebrates evolved as for the more general discussions of some of the principles involved. Zimmer spends a lot of time talking about "exaptation", how a feature that evolved for one purpose was re-purposed for an entirely unrelated use when conditions changed.

This was a little slow getting started, but well worth staying with it; anyone who liked the Neil Shubin's recent Your Inner Fish (which was excellent) should consider picking it up. (This was written well before Shubin's work, and Shubin actually is mentioned a few times in his role as a paleontologist.)

Your interesting review almost overcame my natural disinclination to be interested in anything living in salt water. Living where I do, pacific northwest, I associate salt water with freezing cold! Brrrrrr I like beach combing but usually more because of the nonliving stuff I have found. I am still looking for Japanese floats (big glass balls).

I'll be interested to see what you read next.

At the Water's Edge sounds like something I'd enjoy.

I had to google Japanese floats after reading your comment, Maggie. Way more interesting than anything I've ever found on a beach... of course, I'm hours from the nearest ocean, so my sample size is rather small :)

Japanese floats were being found on our beaches many years ago - maybe the 1950-60s. I don't think the tourist shops even have them at all now. Too bad because they were cool.