| WHERE MOUNTAINS ARE NAMELESS Passion and Politics in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge Jonathan Waterman New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2005 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-393-05219-0 | ||||
| ISBN-10 0-393-05219-2 | 280pp. | HC/BWI | $24.95 | |
| Page xviii: | "That October 18, the nurse prepared the syringe of morphine, tritated in small doses, that would ease Mardy's throat pain." |
| Spelling: S/B "titrated". |
| Page xix: | "Although neither side could concede to final defeat or declare victory,ANWR, like Mardy Murie, had become unassailable." |
| Missing space: S/B "victory, ANWR". |
| Page 9: | "The taxonomic minutia of this ancient land and seascape had its way of keeping one awake." |
| Number: S/B "had their ways". |
| Page 9: | Footnote: "They unearthed nine prehistoric layers, including the oldest in New World history, a four-thousand-year-old, flint-tooled hunting culture that predated the Eskimo." |
| This culture may predate the Eskimo, but it cannot be the oldest known prehistoric culture in the Americas, even as of 2005. Wikipedia's excellent article puts paleo-indians in the Americas 13,000 years ago at minimum. The Norte-Chico (or Caral-Supe) culture of Peru is dated to 2600 BCE or earlier, and there is evidence for even older settlements. |
| Page 12: | "...Peter Mathieson's Far Tortuga, two-hundred pages copied from the Audubon Encyclopedia of Birds..." |
| Unneeded hyphen: S/B "two hundred pages". |
| Page 13: | "These plants float on a several-inches deep sea of plant carcasses, or peat tundra, all blanketing a quarter-mile of permafrost." |
| Possible confusion of width with depth: S/B "quarter-mile depth of permafrost". |
| Page 23: | "In the Inuktitut language, Qaaktugvik, or Kaktovik, means seining place, and qaaktag means cisco." |
| From the context, cisco is a kind of fish.1 |
| Page 26: | "For this so-called barrenlands..." |
| Is this a number error? |
| Page 32: | "No mammal migrates as far as the caribou." |
| Missing word: S/B "no other mammal". |
| Page 42: | "To a stranger, Murie looked frightened, even shy, but..." |
| So "shy" is more frightened than "frightened"? |
| Page 48: | "...thawing surface tundra six inches to ten feet deep, above a quarter-mile-deep permafrost table..." |
| Removes possible confusion of width with depth: See page 13. |
| Page 53: | "The richest oil-soaked strata is speculated to be within..." |
| Number: S/B "are speculated". |
| Pages 53-54: | "But if the geothermal heat of the earth deep below my feet has remained at a tea-drinker's comfort—90 to 190 degrees—for the last million years, drillers might find oil." |
| Range: S/B "90 to 100 degrees". I defy anyone to drink water that's 190°F hot. |
| Page 56: | "And for every eight-pound gallon burned in a combustion engine, five pounds of carbon dioxide is emitted into the upper atmosphere, furthering the greenhouse effect that's flooding tundra polygons and native villages." |
| Number: S/B "are emitted". Also, this math looks wrong. Compare the bottom of page 57, where he says 144 gallons of gasoline produced 720 pounds of CO2. |
| Page 62: | "...the Natural Resource Defence Council..." |
| Spelling: S/B "Resources". |
| Page 63: | "...punctuated by the splash of our paddles, an eerie silence prevailed throughout the sound." |
| Capitalization: S/B "the Sound". |
| Page 72: | "She tramped in rubber boots up prickly fields of devils club and through vales filled with wild violets and..." |
| Punctuation: S/B "devil's club". |
| Page 95: | "While sea kayaking a mile offshore from the Refuge, an oestrid landed on the canvas foredeck of my kayak." |
| Dangling participle: S/B "While I was sea kayaking". |
| Page 98: | "So they took their nine-month-old, Martin, into the hoards of mosquitoes above the remote village of Old Crow..." |
| Spelling: S/B "hordes". Pesky homonyms! |
| Page 106: | "...the Hulahula, the Sadlerochit and the Canning..." |
| According to the map, S/B "Saddlerochit". However, throughout the book Waterman spells it with one "d", and the map has other defects. |
| Page 107: | "Sheep have been in these canyons for a millennia, occasionally chased by wolves..." |
| Number: S/B "for millennia" or "for a millennium". I'd vote for the former choice. |
| Page 111: | "The so-called hyena of North America can consume nearly half its body weight, use its viselike jaws to..." |
| Imprecise: S/B "half its body weight in one meal". |
| Page 152: | "Every bear and wolf are radio collared now..." |
| Number: S/B "is". Also, I question the accuracy of the claim that all such animals wore radio collars at the time. |
| Page 155: | "Snowshoe hares sprung across the road..." |
| Verb tense: S/B "sprang". |
| Page 156: | "While the environmentalists among our students claimed that this scientist alone had put a nail in the coffin of the oil developers' lid..." |
| Word order: S/B "the lid of the oil developers' coffin". |
| Page 160: | "It went on like that. The few tough-as-nails miners who found the courage to stand up and speak, pickaxing their grammar with colorful fits and starts, pleading that people too needed living room. Not just the wolves." |
| Punctuation: S/B "like that: the few" and "living room, not just". (That is, unless this is unconscious mimicry of the miners' speech pattern.) |
| Page 166: | "At the spotless table under blaring white fluorescent lights..." |
| Spelling: S/B "glaring". |
| Page 176: | "He couldn't walk, let alone stand." |
| Word order: S/B "stand, let alone walk". |
| Page 183: | "I asked the students to talk aloud so the boar above wouldn't mistake us for a passing herd of caribou." |
| Spelling: S/B "bear". (I think much of this was transcribed from Waterman's journals by someone else.) |
| Page 185: | "Turdus migratorius (migrating thrush) was a species that our group expected to find plucking worms on a suburban lawn, not plucking microbes out of a glaciated stream in the Arctic." |
| Microbes? |
| Page 187: | "Using a sense of smell a hundred times more prescient than mine..." |
| Vocabulary: S/B "proficient". The same usage occurs elsewhere. |
| Page 195: | "...as she pulled out her husband's notebooks and card files and paints..." |
| Word choice: S/B "paintings". |
| Page 221: | "The region is also known for dangerous vertical wind sheers caused by..." |
| Spelling: S/B "wind shears". |
| Page 225: | "...DeHaviland had designed its planes to withstand the huge payloads and bad landings that folded up the other planes like mosquitoes in the pinchers of yellow jackets." |
| Spelling: S/B "pincers". |
| Page 233: | "By striding at a fast four miles per hour, the light-winged bugs were sucked into the wake of my slipstream." |
| Dangling participle: S/B "I sucked the light-winged bugs". |
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