Book Review: Nature's Echo

Title: Nature's Echo

Author: Thomas Crowther

Date: 2026 (today!)

Publisher: Harper 

ISBN: 978-1-4002-5070-7

Quote: "I had been injected with a powerful shot of nocebo (the opposite of placebo), so the idea that I had been envenomated was enough to trigger a physiological response that matched the symptoms of a venomous bite."

In the opening chapter of this book, Thomas Crowther describes the experience of picking up a snake he was told was harmless. When the snake actually managed to bite him, someone told him it was venomous after all. His hand began to feel ominously numb as he was rushed to a hospital. At the hospital he was assured that the snake was the harmless one his friend had first identified it as being. Sensation returned to his hand--it was sore from having been bumped against things to measure its numbness.

Harmless snakes can do significant temporary damage--some bites are hard enough to crack a small bone in a hand or wrist--so this is not a story about foolish naivete. As Crowther ranges on through all the favorite theories and speculations of the New Age sciency crowd, evolution, quarks, spirals, etc., it takes some time to identify the theme in this book, but that theme is, primarily, the idea that many things in nature follow feedback loops. Undesirable things aggravate each other. "Pesticide" sprays aggravate the imbalance monocropped fields create, destroy predators, and allow harmless nuisances like corn earworms to explode into major pest status. Desirable things enhance each other. Seeing good results from a diet and exercise plan motivates dieters to work their programs for even better results. And so on.

Several details and side points in this book will activate the mental rubbish detectors of many readers of this web site. Some details even made me laugh. I wondered if Crowther appreciated the irony of writing about socioeconomic "inequalities" as a problem while being funded by the World Economic Forum, a group who aren't doing much about the feedback loops that bounce wealth back to them. I chortled, reading sections about global warming, after Al Gore has just told us that it may have been that old ice age of our youth that we need to worry about, after all. This book is Green, but not True Green.

Partly that's because of the writer's self-admitted limitations. This book deals with science topics but it doesn't read like a science book--neither the mass of numbers in a professional science article, nor the summaries with just a few well-chosen numbers in a really well written popular science book by someone like Oliver Sacks. Crowther admits that that's because his learning disabilities made it hard for him to do rigorous science experiments on his own, so a sympathetic teacher let him get credit for observing the results of experiments while others crunched the numbers. No woman would get a science degree that way, I'm sure. Crowther seems to read science and study nature in the informal, observational, anecdotal way I do as a non-scientist, but it's never occurred to me to call myself a scientist. (It has occurred to me to go back to university and do the work to become one.) It's not "feminization" so what's the word for that kind of effect on the sciences?

On the individual scientist, the effect is plain. Crowther accepts other people's conclusions, including Michael Mann's "hockey stick" climate change graph, which Steve Milloy has been so gleefully debunking for so long. He's not an idiot, his learning disabilities do not include autism, but he can be used as a "useful idiot" by WEF.

Nevertheless, the book is hopeful and plausible. His sponsors have warned him, Crowther admits, that only big (preferably global) government can be considered as a solution to the problem of global warming. Still, feedback loops mean that choosing a vegan meal might start a loop that could do something toward saving the planet. Crowther has been steered away from studying the problem of "pesticide" residues that make vegan meals so toxic for so many people these days. He has also seen some examples of individuals' efforts expanding outward into feedback loops that he thinks are helping the Earth. 

When he's reporting what he's seen, as he does toward the end of this book, rather than regurgitating theories, as he does toward the beginning, Crowther is a competent writer. Overall this book is a pleasant read. Not essential, not True Green, but fun.

Book Review: Crabs

Book Review: Crabs

Author: Herbert S. Zim

Date: 1974

Publisher: William Morrow & Company

ISBN: 0-688-30114-2

Length: 64 pages including index

Illustrations: drawings by René Martin

 

Quote: “Crabs show another interesting kind of growth that is called regeneration.”

This is an informative little picture book, meant to be a challenging read in grades three and four, informative enough to interest adults.

Reviewing Crabs, about which there’s little for an amateur to say, provides me with as good an opportunity as any to share what I know about books for children and the notion of “reading levels.”

I learned to read before my fourth birthday. Being a child prodigy was good for lots of adult attention and resulting envy and hostility from other children. People handed me all sorts of grown-up things to read; I remember entertaining our pediatrician by reading aloud from his medical journals. Like most children who figure out phonics and seem to be “reading” material beyond their age level, I didn’t understand or remember most of the grown-up stuff I “read”. I remember keeping myself awake, reading the medical journal, by imagining “Hemoglobin” as a little cartoon goblin; I remember that even Charlotte’s Web was far enough over my head, at four, that I rediscovered it as a completely new book at eight.

In most ways my brother was more precocious than I was. Let’s just say that while I was being the child prodigy and waiting for kids my age to catch up with me, my brother, three years younger, was never far behind me in anything. So naturally people expected him to start reading at three, after playing with alphabet blocks and magnets, as I had. But he didn’t. He could spell out short messages (“I LOVE YOU MOM”) with magnetic letters, and he liked to have grown-up books read to him, but he didn’t seem to read even picture books by himself until age six. As a result, in primary school his I.Q. was drastically underestimated. At home, while he was in grades one through three, he’d find me reading something age-appropriate like Tom Sawyer or Heidi and want to read it too. He’d read a few pages and then bring the book back to me: “Would you read the rest of it? I’m tired.”

Toward the end of grade three he spent a rainy morning curled up with one of those Zane Grey books I scorned, and then my brother became a reader. He liked all stories with dogs and horses in them, but his preference was for grown-up nonfiction; there was no in-between stage. He’d liked to have history, biography, and simple science read aloud even at six. We had to imagine that my brother had had the mental ability to read even at three, but had had to wait for his eyes to mature before he could enjoy reading ordinary-size print.

Later we learned that this is quite a common way children, especially boys, learn to read. They may be intelligent enough to learn the letters before age six, but they are slightly farsighted up to six, eight, even ten, and won’t start reading ordinary books for pleasure until their eyes are ready for that job. If they are not given an emotional complex about it, or forced to wear glasses that may interfere with the development of normal vision, they usually outgrow this farsightedness in time to catch up with their age group at school--or pass it. (How computers affect the development of children’s eyes remains to be learned.) That’s why books that work for most primary school students will have large clear print.

Crabs has large clear print, and although my brother was not particularly interested in crabs, this is the kind of book that primary school students like him need. A slow-reading first-grader who lived near the beach and was interested in crabs might enjoy reading this book, a page or two at a time, as his eyes would allow, in time to relieve the anxiety of adults who underestimate his intelligence because he’s not reading novels. 

Book Review: Time and Mr Bass

Book Review: Time and Mr. Bass

Author: Eleanor Cameron

Date: 1967

Publisher: Atlantic Monthly / Little Brown & Company

ISBN: none

Length: 247 pages

Illustrations: drawings by Fred H. Meise

Quote: “They had left Basidium at precisely four in the morning, earth time, as they always did, and it was now six in the morning when the space ship came down on Welsh soil.”

In Eleanor Cameron’s “Mushroom Planet” series, space aliens who seem to have evolved from fungi have settled and lived incognito for many years in damp, cave-riddled, fungus-friendly Wales. “Cameron” is not a Welsh name. It comes from Scotland. My legal name isn’t Welsh either, and nobody seems to have cared to try to find out whether the Jones cousins were related to Welsh or English Joneses. So although I’ve never been sure whether this series is more of a celebration of Welshness or an ethnic slur, neither am I sure whether I have a right to object if it’s a slur. Relatively large heads on relatively small bodies are observed in some Welsh families but this certainly does not indicate that these individuals evolved from fungi. 

What I have a right to observe is that Cameron lived and wrote in Marin County, California, which is also damp and fungus-friendly. She put lots of fun fungus facts into this series.

Maybe I’m just prejudiced about the subgenre of science fiction in which children solve problems beyond the powers of adults. I think this blatant attempt to flatter child readers is more offensive than flattering. Stories where the child is the one small enough to slip through the crack, or pure-minded enough to ride the unicorn, or bored enough to poke about and discover the secret, don’t bother me. Stories where the aliens go to the children first for help, and children too young to drive motorbikes are allowed to drive spaceships, do bother me. I felt that way when I was six years old, and I feel that way still.

The fad for stories like the Mushroom Planet stories, in which the parents of the little space cadets are too clueless even to notice that their kids are having all these wacky adventures, peaked around the time my generation were hearing all about the supposed “generation gap” that kept us from really liking or understanding our parents. Which was absolute rot. Did I, did my brother, did our friends, disagree with our parents? Of course we did. Did most of us plan eventually to leave our parents and marry people closer to our own ages? Of course we did. Did that mean that, while we were single and living with our parents and dependent on our parents for money, we felt “more loyalty” to mere school friends than we felt to our parents? Exactly how stupid did the people propagating this propaganda think we were?

There were some compromise stories, at this period, where the child protagonists might have idiot parents or simply absent parents, but they had normal child-adult relationships with some other older person. I think this was the appeal of Batman and Robin, whose relationship later became suspicious because they weren’t positively defined as relatives, or Speed Racer and Racer X, who were safely identified as brothers. I liked stories where the children had interesting parts, but were able to work as a team with a parent or parent-substitute. Kids weren’t going to be the only ones in the space colony who could solve a simple science or logic problem—duh!—but kids could help their parents, more plausibly than they could be the ones to help aliens...I think, even at age six, I might have been just a tiny bit wary about this notion of kids secretly helping aliens.

Well, some people hate elves and fairies, too, and I enjoyed them. Many people, including SARK (Susan Ariel Rainbow Kennedy), have loved the Mushroom Planet books. Many people are as willing to suspend disbelief in spaceships children can drive as they are in time travel, thought travel, or the idea of a Mushroom Planet. I will say that, if you’re one of those people, this is a high-grade, well-written mix of science, science fiction, and fantasy.  Lots of fun facts about fungi are woven into hilariously unlikely adventures.