| THE ESKIMO AND THE OIL MAN The Battle at the Top of the World for America's Future Bob Reiss New York: Business Plus, May 2012 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-1-4555-2524-9 | ||||
| ISBN-10 1-4555-2524-3 | 305pp. | HC/BWI | $27.99 | |
| Page 28: | "Arctic summer sea ice shrank by nearly 40 percent between 1978 and 2007. Winter temperatures have dropped by several degrees Fahrenheit from a few decades ago." |
| Wrong sense: S/B "risen" since this continues to describe the warming of the Arctic. Alaska's Climate Research Center puts the average change for Alaska at +3.0°F from 1949 to 2011, with Barrow having the largest net annual change: +4.9°F. |
| Page 39: | "We're an oil and gas company. We believe oil and gas is in everyone's best interest and will be a hugely important part of the energy mix during the next century." |
| Number errors: S/B "are" and "hugely important parts". |
| Page 64: | "Finally in 2008, Dave Lawrence—Shell's executive vice president for exploration, asked Pete if he wanted to move to Alaska." |
| Missing comma, missing m-dash: S/B "Finally, in 2008," and "exploration—asked Pete". |
| Page 66: | "Once the analysis was done and the lease sold, the company buying it could still not drill yet." |
| Redundant: S/B "still could not drill". |
| Page 66: | "If MMS approved the plan, that still did not entitle drilling, though." |
| Redundant: S/B "that still did not entitle drilling". |
| Page 67: | "Anytime boats were to be operated in Arctic waters—seismic boats, drill rigs, survey ships—a permit was required..." |
| Missing space: S/B "Any time boats". |
| Page 70: | "Peter Scott [. . .] had recently moved to Anchorage with his wife and two young daughters from Australia." |
| Misleading: S/B "from Australia with his wife and two young daughters". |
| Page 76: | "But even officers on a Coast Guard icebreaker conducting research off the North Slope in 2010 found that harassment permissions were late in coming from Washington that year." |
| Missing punctuation, perhaps: S/B "harassment; permissions". |
| Page 77: | "Results of the mission were to go to the White House and State Department but kept away from the press." |
| Missing word: S/B "but be kept away from the press". |
| Page 79: | "That's why the Healy never goes north in winter." |
| Misleading. If an icebreaker never goes north in winter, what good is it? I think the preceding description of the Healy was too vague to justify this conclusion — or else the conclusion is too broad. Also, it's not true that Healy is the Coast Guard's only functioning icebreaker: it has three. (See p. 205.) |
| Page 82: | "If they could do that, [. . .] the committee would hopefully decide that the data justified a US claim..." |
| Usage: S/B "it was hoped the committee would decide". |
| Page 90: | " 'I'll see you Tuesday,' was a punch line Andy Stevenson told me." |
| Missing comma: S/B "was a punch line, Andy Stevenson told me." |
| Page 95: | "Make a list of powerful American groups supporting the Law of the Sea Treaty and you'd be surprised at the mix. Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama..." |
| Missing words: S/B "of powerful American people and groups." |
| Page 98: | "Pickart worked with mooring devices that measure ocean temperature, current and salinity." |
| Missing letters: S/B "monitoring devices". |
| Page 100: | "Barrow in the popular imagination tends to be misunderstood or ignored when attention is paid to it at all." |
| Word order, missing comma: S/B "ignored, or misunderstood" |
| Page 104: | "The Alaska Claims Native Settlement Act, passed by Congress on December 18, 1971..." |
| Word order: S/B "Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act". |
| Page 122: | "...the National Petroleum Reserve, an immense area south of Barrow, designated federal territory by President Warren Harding between world wars when the country sought a domestic fuel supply for the armed forces." |
| Missing article: S/B "between the world wars". |
| Page 124: | "Alaska had become Kuwait of America." |
| Missing article: S/B "the Kuwait of America". |
| Page 124: | "All the proud monuments of the city.." |
| This sentence fragment should probably be joined with "and" to the paragraph above. |
| Page 133: | "A clock was running because oil leases are only good for ten years. After that they revert to the government." |
| I think this must refer to unused oil leases. |
| Page 135: | "He wondered, What did that mean?" |
| Missing quotation marks: S/B " 'What did that mean?' ". |
| Page 144: | "I am an Iñupiaq Eskimo..." |
| I believe this is the wrong word: S/B "Iñupiat". Iñupiaq refers to the language they speak. |
| Page 150: | "And so, October 14, the old game afoot..." |
| Incomplete date: S/B "October 14, 2010,". This avoids confusion with previous years mentioned just before. |
| Page 150: | "Elmendorf based F-22 Raptors could fly..." |
| Missing hyphen: S/B "Elmendorf-based". |
| Page 151: | "Atkins is an intellectually curious man [...] whose staffers are under orders to bring him any news they find about Arctic security, climate, ice melt, the Northwest Passage clearing of ice, and oil spills. All could affect his work, he felt." |
| Wrong verb tense: S/B "he feels". |
| Page 174: | "The accident had happened —he learned— because a chopper blade—refurbished years earlier after being damaged by a lightning strike, and rebuilt under FAA standards—had cracked anyway." |
| Reiss tends to overuse m-dashes: S/B ", he learned,". Also, this reference to FAA standards is ambiguous. Is Reiss trying to say the blade failed despite being rebuilt to FAA standards, or that the rebuilding process did not meet those standards? |
| Page 176: | "The skimmers—a sort of giant rolling mop system—could soak up and deposit it in a storage tanker able to hold 500,000 barrels." |
| This seems a rather small amount, especially when it has to be stationed four hours away from the drill site (because of air quality regulations.) |
| Page 181: | "Once dubbed the 'world's finest office building' because it had central air conditioning when it was completed in December 1936, it resembles an old block-sized Soviet-era granite lump." |
| It is an old block-sized Soviet-era building. As for resembling a granite lump, I submit that that is subjective. |
| Page 186: | "Ask Pete Slaiby how they're going to clean up oil under ice?" |
| Punctuation: S/B "how they're going to clean up oil under ice." |
| Pages 188-9: | "Van Tuyn had experience on both ends of these laws as, early on, he worked as a lawyer for the Justice Department under the George Herbert Walker Bush administration, where 'I did black hat stuff as well as white hat stuff,' he said." |
| It's clear that the author points out unmistakably that this was the "Bush 41" administration (Bush pére, not Bush fils) to make it clear that Van Tuyn was not involved in the "Bush 43" attorney-general scandals. But what is not clear is what "black hat" and "white hat" are supposed to mean in this context. |
| Page 189: | "Nobody from Shell or Mayor Itta's office attended the affair, during which former president Dwight Eisenhower received the Arctic Legacy award, for establishing the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and Jimmy Carter received the Arctic Stewardship Award, for expanding that wilderness." |
| Misplaced commas: S/B "received the Arctic Legacy award for establishing the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and Jimmy Carter received the Arctic Stewardship Award for". Also, does everyone remember that Jimmy Carter was also president? |
| Page 193: | "Above the earth, meanwhile, SAR satellites searched in Arctic darkness and through clouds for escaped oil, able to concentrate on sea surface areas as small as a square meter." |
| Context makes it clear that this acronym means "synthetic-aperture radar," but it should still have been expanded to prevent confusion with "search and rescue," which was my first thought — and just because it's good practice. |
| Page 194: | "The rest of the view on the way down had been raw—thrusting peaks, sheer escarpments, the Makushin Volcano, which still smoked occasionally." |
| Punctuation: S/B "thrusting peaks; sheer escarpments; the Makushin Volcano, which still smoked occasionally". The next sentence uses semicolons properly (at least part-way through.) |
| Page 194: | "Nature dwarfed any man-made structures but the structures were solid—a cozy-looking town and a cupola of a Russian Orthodox church; docks, piers, and warehouses along shore; cranes, bars, paved streets..." |
| Missing word: S/B "along the shore". |
| Page 195: | "One out of five flights to Dutch Harbor are canceled due to bad weather." |
| Number error: S/B "is canceled". |
| Page 205: | "Since the United States had no functioning icebreakers except for the Healy..." |
| I'm not sure what the author's basis is for this claim. The U.S. has three polar-class icebreakers. |
| Page 208: | "He had also met with angry Gov. Sean Parnell and assured him that he was not actively opposing Shell." |
| This is correct: Sean R. Parnell was elected to a full term as Alaska's tenth governor in November 2010, after replacing Sarah Palin in July 2009. (But the index gives it as "Parnell, Scott".) |
| Page 227: | "These days Pepe's catered public events in Barrow, including..." |
| Verb tense error: S/B "caters". As written, it looks like "catered" is an adjective. |
| Page 246: | "In the future—in the same way that new drugs have come from temperate climates—a childhood leukemia cure from..." |
| Punctuation: S/B ", in the same way that". (Replace the m-dash with a comma and a space.) |
| Page 251: | "Banners strung from the ceiling announced the Kotzebue Northern Lights Dancers and the Kaktovik Dance Group, the Utuqqagmiut Dancers, the Tagiugmiut Dancers, the Suurimaanitchuat Dancers." |
| He's not fooling us; he just wants to show off his command of Iñupiat names. <G> |
| Page 263: | "LIDAR, an acronym for Light, Detection, and Ranging was similar to radar..." |
| Punctuation: S/B "Light Detection and Ranging". It still is similar to radar. Also, if one acronym is given in all caps, so should the other be: "RADAR". |
| Page 273: | "The Department of the Interior had spent many thousands of taxpayer dollars on this trip—for the stenographer present and hotel rooms and food bills and air tickets, for all the meetings..." |
| Usage: S/B "airline tickets". No one is charging for oxygen—yet. |
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