| THE HUMAN, THE ORCHID, AND THE OCTOPUS Exploring and Conserving our Natural World Jacques Cousteau Susan Schiefelbein Bill McKibben (Fwd.) New York: Bloomsbury, October 2007 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-1-59691-417-9 | ||||
| ISBN 1-59691-417-3 | 305pp. | HC/FCI | $25.95 | |
| Page 34: | "The startling discoveries Szent-Györgyi made by following his curiosity—for which he'd been awarded not one but two Nobels — in fact so contradicted all prior assumptions that..." |
| Albert Szent-Györgyi is a Nobel laureate — but only once: Medicine, 1937. Four people have won more than once:
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| Page 39: | "On a ledge at its mouth rested a neatly piled mount of oyster shells—left, most likely, by the humans who once lingered on this fossil beach, now 558 feet below the surface of the sea." |
| Poetic license or accurate description? How likely is that pile of oyster shells to remain untumbled by all the waves that washed over it as the sea's level was rising? |
| Page 93: | "...policy makers decided to launch a double thermonuclear generator as the first radioactive package to be carried on a space shuttle." |
| This is misleading terminology. The device was a radioisotope thermoelectric generator, or RTG. It applies the heat from the radioisotope to thermoelectric devices which generate a few hundred Watts of electricity. RTGs are used only on missions to the outer planets, where sunlight is too weak for solar arrays to be effective. Since the text mentions Challenger, I can say that this RTG was part of the Galileo mission to Jupiter which finally launched on an expendable rocket. |
| Page 99: | "When Rachel Carson published The Silent Spring, defenders of the pesticide faith railed..." |
| The correct title is two words: Silent Spring. And it's a nit, but she was the writer, not the publisher. |
| Page 100: | "Californians persist in centering the heart of their electronic industry on platonic faults so unstable that..." |
| Vocabulary: S/B "tectonic faults". (This may be a mistranscription of "plutonic," but that word doesn't fit either.) |
| Page 103: | "Severe poisoning—caused by a even drop of the compounds..." |
| Words transposed: S/B "even a drop". |
| Page 115: | "Never again can life appear anew on this planet; the oxygen that sustains life today would be so corrosive..." |
| The problem with this is that very corrosiveness. If life were wiped off Earth, the oxygen in its atmosphere would react within a geologically short time with plant matter and rocks, restoring conditions much like those under which life began the first time. |
| Page 117: | "Fifteen million people ascribe to Judaism..." |
| Vocabulary: S/B "subscribe". |
| Page 118: | "For the invisible things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen." |
| This passage from Saint Paul contradicts itself; for if the things are invisible, they are by definition impossible to see. (It reminds me of an absurdity attributed to a UFO believer: "They have invisible ships; I've seen them.") |
| Page 123: | "He [Christ] asked other followers, 'Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? And one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father.' " |
| Cousteau meant this verse (Matthew 10:29) to show the value of all God's creatures. But its impact is somewhat lessened by the next two verses: "But the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear ye not therefore, ye are of more value than many sparrows." |
| Page 135: | "It is precisely on these scant coastlines that saccageurs wreck their havoc." |
| S/B "wreak". |
| Page 142: | "Where were the groupers, the moral eels, the lobsters..." |
| Surely a typo: S/B "moray eels". When the eel bites your hand with a pain you can't stand, that's a moray. (Sing it with me...) |
| Page 164: | "...is evident in the enforcement authority they endow on the agencies: none whatsoever." |
| Usage: S/B "with which they endow" or, more likely, "bestow on". |
| Page 181: | "...we as voters and taxpayers can no longer afford to confuse science and technology, to confound 'pure' science and 'applied' science." |
| Vocabulary: S/B "conflate". |
| Page 190: | "A scientific discovery could, within months, produce not only the atom bomb but also penicillin, plasma, and the first electronic computer." |
| I understand that Cousteau doesn't mean a single discovery could produce all these things. But he still underestimates the time required to develop these things, especially the atomic bomb. |
| Page 199: | "A relatively miniscule coterie of technologists rule over the scientific innovations..." |
| Number: S/B "rules over". |
| Page 227: | Scientists' concerns centered specifically on one particular group of isotopes within the ore—uranium 235..." |
| U235 is not a group of isotopes; it is a single isotope. |
| Page 233: | "The Ukraine could not come up with anything close to the billions of dollars needed..." |
| Probably a mistake due to long habit: S/B just "Ukraine". (The same goof happens on page 245.) |
| Page 240: | "Be reassured: There will never be an exception to the Second Law of Thermodynamics." |
| Spot on. But Cousteau's mistake is applying the Second Law to the production of plutonium in a fast-neutron reactor. |
| Page 249: | "As John Deutch, then deputy secretary of defense..." |
| Spelling: S/B "Deutsch". |
| Page 250: | ...an announcement that brought to mind the two hundred pounds of highly enriched uranium that mysteriously went missing from a Pennsylvania plant decades ago." |
| I would really really like to see a cite for this.1 |
| Page 253: | Quote: "Vaporizing cores of nuclear reactors with nuclear weapons is clearly an efficient way to desolate large parts of a nation." |
| Sure. But given that it would take a ground burst to vaporize the reactor core, it's not clear how much additional fallout the core would provide. (Another nit: "devastate" would be a better word. I expect that large parts of any nation would be made desolate by just one nuclear weapon.) |
| Page 258: | "...all the unponderables and unpredictables of the planet..." |
| Vocabulary: S/B "imponderables". |
| Page 259: | "Back in 1946, Louis Mumford..." |
| Spelling: S/B "Lewis". (See page 304.) |
| Page 288: | "...as D. H. Lawrence wrote, 'mountain pressing against mountain, the zest of life'." |
| A very slight misquote from the D. H. Lawrence poem Whales Weep Not!: S/B "Then the great bull lies up against his bride in the blue deep bed of the sea, as mountain pressing on mountain, in the zest of life..." The poem can be found on many Web pages. See e.g. Whales Weep Not! at the Academy of American Poets. |
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