Favorite books of 2007 Part II

This is the second of three posts with my list of favorite books for 2007. This post covers the five books that nearly made my top five list and they appear in no special order. This is not a countdown.

Tent Life in Siberia, was written as a journal by George Kennan, who was sent in 1864 to survey Eastern Siberia for a telegraph line and spent two years living with the natives in dark, cold yurts that smelled of smoke, sweat and blubber or camping out under the aurora borealis at 50 below. Like his contemporaries Mark Twain and John Muir, Kennan had prodigious powers of observation and wrote with a very sharp pen. For more, see my October 13 and 15 entries.

Speaking of Muir, he also makes my top-ten list for My First Summer in the Sierra, written shortly after the summer of 1869 from his journal notes. The heart of the book is not Yosemite or the unspoiled Sierras, but Muir’s own palpable love of the land and everything in it, his boundless exuberance and a Zen-like unity with grizzly bears and cumulus clouds.

Audubon, The Making of an American (2004), Pulitzer Prize-winner Richard Rhodes’ 20th book, is a good account of JJ’s painting and naturalizing, if you’re already an Audubon fan, but I found it fascinating for its portrait of America in the early 1800s – the forgotten years of American history. Everyone (it seems) had boomer fever and business consisted of get-rich schemes and an endless attempt to collect on debts at a time when just getting from point A to point B required incredible physical energy and courage. It’s also notable for the descriptions of the nearly untouched wilderness of the Ohio and Mississippi valleys and Audubon’s belated realization that it was all vanishing before his eyes.

The Making of the Fittest (2006), by Sean B. Carroll, is for fans of evolution. Yes, evolution has fans! Carroll takes evolution down to the genetic level to answer some of the puzzles of everyday life, including a fascinating chapter on color vision. There’s plenty of math and bio-chemistry in the book, but it’s still accessible for us dilatants.

After the Ice Age: The Return of Life to Glaciated North America (1992), by E. C. Pielou, has more statistics and graphs than a glacier has gravel, but like the glacier, the book inevitably gets to its point. Pielou is worth reading just for her nifty explanation of the Milankovich cycle -- the 105,000-year cycle in the shape of the earth's elliptical orbit, as mediated by the 41,000-year cycle in the tilt of earth's axis (known as the obliquity of the ecliptic) and both mediated by the 21,000-year precession of the equinoxes, the movement of the equinox forward through the months. And that's not even what causes the glacial pre-condition. (Hint) It’s continential drift and the relative position of the continents.

Coming soon: My top five.