Two Books with Cold Titles

The climate may be warming, but the weather is chilling. Here are two alternatives to consider for October reads.

After the Ice Age: The Return of Life to Glaciated North America

by E. C. Pielou

Anyone who blithely thinks that the global warming analysis is completed and that we know all the answers needs to read this book and realize just how dynamic climate patterns can be over as little a period as the past 20,000 years. But reading it requires that the reader put away his science as politics mentality and listen thoughtfully to an amazing story.

Gives a wonderful insight into the history of global climate change even though that is not the focus of the book. You will come away understanding the history of species and climate change in North America, and understanding how this information is distorted by current climate change opportunists who want you to believe this is some kind of new phenomenon. This book was written long before climate change was a political issue which is refreshing as it deals in the subject in a purely academic fashion.

This is a great in-depth excursion on a well-travelled topic. The species and disappearance of North American megafauna, glacial cycles and the role of physics in their appearance, the controversy over the 1st peoples of North America are just examples of some of the topics discussed. Focuses primarily on Canadian ecologies for the simple reason that the last ice age didn't penetrate much farther south except at higher elevations. While basic info can be gleaned from any number of websites, to mine the knowledge of someone who is both learned and a lucid writer besides is a fascinating priviledge.

Tent Life in Siberia: An Incredible Account of Siberian Adventure, Travel, and Survival
by George Kennan

This book is the fascinating travel journal of George Kennan (1845-1924) who was employed by the Russo-American Telegraph company to explore Eastern Siberia in 1865. Leaving from San Francisco in July 1865 Mr. Kennan and three other men set out for Petropavlovski in Kamchatka. From there they began a march to the northwest, meeting the Sea of Okhotsk and then detouring West for a while until heading north, exploring Eastern Siberia as far as the Berings strait, to Anadyrsk. They navigated rivers, saw the Aurua Borealis in February 1867. In the end the exploration did not lead to the laying of telegraph cable, but nevertheless this account should rank with Twain's `Innocents Abroad' as one of the great pieces of American travel literature of the 19th century.

Kennan has a dry sarcastic whit, like Twain, and he writes on many things, from wildlife to flaura, to the people and the country. Most amazing is to consider the great distances covered by such few people. There are many interesting stories and insights into the hard life of Russians in the far east. There are also descriptions of the many native peoples, including Koraks, Kamchatdals, Chookchees, Yookaghirs, Chooances, Yakoots and Gakouts, to the depth of describing rituals, marriages and the languages.

The greatest, almost unforgivable, oversight in this book, one that is almost crippling, is lack of even one map in an account that begs to have many maps given that it is both a travel narrative and one that mentions many obscure places and tribes that no longer exist in the same form today. The reader is left to imagine the position of the Samanka or Penzhina rivers, the villages of Genul, Okoota or Anadyrsk, or the most obscure villages in north Siberia, such as Geezhega or Shestakova.