| EATING THE SUN How Plants Power the Planet Oliver Morton New York: HarperCollins, December 2008 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-00-716364-9 | ||||
| ISBN 0-00-716364-9 | 460pp. | HC/GSI | $28.95 | |
| Page 9: | "As I write this, it strikes me how unfortunate it is that English gives only a technical name for something as basic to life as carbon dioxide, something as fundamental as blood and breath. Because it is indiscernible without instruments and has thus never furnished our perceptual world, I'm forced to write about it under a name that, even if it doesn't alienate, certainly can't carry any freight of emotion. 'Water' is as rich in imagery as a word can be; 'oxygen', coined just two hundred years ago, has far fewer associations, but still has some general aura of necessity and energy and freshness. 'Carbon dioxide' is just a chemical. There's no way out of this — I'm certainly not going to try your patience by replacing the term with some daft nonce like 'themypoid" or 'pickliff'. But it's salutary to remember that language itself can contrive to mask the richness and relevance of the world that science reveals." |
| Or like "life"? |
| Page 21: | "In their lab in the 'Rat House' — an annexe to the chemistry department..." |
| This is the British spelling. Morton's book is rife with Britishisms, as is only natural. |
| Pages 22-3: | "One was that carbon-11 could be got into plants quicker than it could be into animals (to get it into animals you had to grow a plant and have the animal eat it)." |
| Why not inject it? |
| Page 35: | "The workspaces were well lit, with black glass worktops and the best, deepest porcelain sinks..." |
| Black glass? Seriously? |
| Pages 36-7: | "Different sugars would always move to their preordained places; glucose here, pentose there, triose off to this side, ribulose over there. If you didn't recognize something, you could always label the mystery patch Godnose, and more than once they did." |
| Heh. Whonose, please. This is better under Article One. |
| Page 47: | "...as long as you have enough folic acid it's perfectly safe." Methanol martinis?! |
| I don't think I'll try this at home. |
| Page 58: | "...he would delight in casting a disconcerting look at visitors to his lab and muttering 'I'm growing madder, you know'. The effect was undoubtedly heightened by his wonderfully asymmetric eyebrows..." |
| To which, since madder is a Eurasian herb of the family Rubiaceae, the proper response is, "Woad, dude!" Woad is the Old World plant Isatis Tinctoria, or the blue dye obtained from its leaves. Both plants are mentioned in the book. |
| Page 66: | "Nearby is what seems to be a relic from the trip to Singapore: an amelanchier of some sort..." |
| An ornamental plant, also known as shadbush, wild plum, and by other names. The genus includes some 20 species. It is found in Asia, Europe, Canada and every U.S. state except Hawaii. Individuals grow to heights from 0.2 to 20m, and produce berries eaten by wildlife. |
| Page 68: | "It eventually turned out that all that was needed was that the added extract contained salts of a particular form of iron." |
| Poor wording: S/B "salts of the ferric form of iron". This refers to the oxidation state: "ferric" is +3; "ferrous" is +2. It's no more complex than many other points. |
| Page 98: | "It is also, by the standards of molecular biology, frighteningly big and gnarly..." |
| Here's another opportunity for California dialect, but I'll pass it by. |
| Pages 101-2: | "Arnold suggested that neon flickering on and off fifty times a second might do the job better." |
| Here Morton makes a very forgivable goof. The British power mains frequency is indeed fifty Hertz. But Arnold worked at Caltech, so he would have had sixty-Hertz AC. |
| Page 102: | "This was no longer a job for simple neon: Arnold built a much more sophisticated light sources [...] to provide flashes just twenty millionths of a second long at intervals of as little as three hundredths of a second." |
| This description is correct but misleading. Since the time between flashes needed to be longer than the neon setup could provide, it should read "three hundredths of a second or longer". AC mains would give a time of 16mSec (20 mSec in Britain). |
| Page 108: | "Arnold worked with him on one of the first experiments on phage — viruses that attack bacteria..." |
| Number: S/B "phages". Or better yet "bacteriophages". See also page 122. |
| Pages 156-7: | "From his infancy on, Pirie boasted a strongly sceptical temperament and a delight in robust debate..." |
| British overstatement? It's easy to picture an infant being stubborn or vociferous, but skeptical? |
| Page 157: | "...at a point where neither the word 'living' nor the word 'dead' were of much use." |
| Number: S/B "was". |
| Page 165: | "The bolshy but soulful biochemist thought they might also capture the awakening of the earth itself..." |
| My guess: this is British slang for "Bolshevik". But I may be wrong, since, like any Russian, a Bolshevik is anything but soulless. (Also, Morton never capitalizes the name of our planet Earth.) |
| Page 168: | "Instead it has been with the help of the DNA in the plants and bacteria around us today." |
| This Britishism threw me momentarily. I read it as "it has been due to". |
| Page 169: | "The archaea, which seen down a microscope are more or less indiscernible from bacteria..." |
| More Britishisms. For "indiscernible," I would substitute "indistinguishable." As for "more or less," it doesn't fit here. The two kingdoms are either hard to distinguish, or they aren't. (In fact I echo Frank Sinatra's character in The Manchurian Candidate: the phrase makes no sense.) |
| Page 170: | "Some of the hooks with which that cytochrome hangs on to its iron-containing haem groups are in the same positions..." |
| Translated to Yangish: "its iron-containing heme groups". |
| Page 176: | "Sulphur comes in four stable isotopes, and the different nuclear configurations in these isotopes is subtly reflected in the behavior of their electrons." |
| Number: S/B "are subtly reflected". |
| Page 179: | "Stretched back more than almost a quarter of the way to the Big Bang itself." |
| Extra words: S/B "almost". (Or "more than"; I didn't take the trouble to run the numbers.) |
| Page 183: | "There radiation would have torn off its hydrogen atoms and set it off along the geocoronal highway to the stars." |
| Number, word choice: S/B "sent them off". Morton is talking about the process by which a world loses water. |
| Page 204: | "...other things being equal bacteria stay pretty small." Footnote: "There are exceptions; they don't concern us." |
| Right; they only concern Captain Janeway. But seriously, don't drop tantalizing hints like that. |
| Page 221: | "...as are the bodies of the wee and quite possibly timourous beasties that lived among them..." |
| A reference to Robert Burns's "To a Mouse": "Wee, sleekit, cow'rin', tim'rous beastie...". |
| Page 226: | "They can hardly look stranger than baobabs." |
| Are you sure? Recall the words of J. B. S. Haldane. |
| Page 247: | "When there are fewer volcanoes in the oceans, the mid-ocean ridges slump down a bit..." |
| Fewer volcanoes, yes, since the total extent of ridges is less. But not fewer volcanoes per kilometer of ridge, I think. |
| Page 260: | "But one of its least exceptionable, almost banal, formulations is that the universe we observe must be a universe which permits the existence of intelligent observers." |
| Spelling, degree of comparison: S/B "least exceptional, almost banal,". And for the latter, some would say "more than almost banal". (See page 179.) |
| Page 261: | "The history of life and its earthly environment could be no more than the opposite of the writings of Lemony Snicket — a series of fortunate events." |
| Falls flat without knowledge of Lemony Snicket — which is not indexed BTW. |
| Page 261: | "...a Gaian who doesn't believe in Gaia which particularly irritates Lovelock." |
| Missing comma: S/B "Gaia, which". |
| Page 265: | "There's some reason to believe that the current disposition of climate and vegetation could be predicted..." |
| Spelling: S/B "disposition". *** CHECK THE BOOK AGAIN *** |
| Page 274: | "...but the angiosperms now make up the vast bulk of the earth's biomass, and are responsible for most of the photosynthesis that takes place on land." |
| I've read that bacteria make up the most of biomass. Depends on the definition, I suppose. |
| Page 277: | "...the spread of grasses has increased the rate at which dissolved silica flushes into the oceans." |
| How soluble is silica again? |
| Page 296: | "There's also a record of hydrogen isotopes which, interpreted in a similar way, gives a record of past air temperatures." |
| This is done with oxygen isotopes. I was not aware that hydrogen and deuterium figured in. |
| Page 296: | "It reveals four ice-age cycles, each a hundred thousand years long. In each of them the ice builds up in a number of spurts, with slight relapses in between; sometimes there are three such spurts, sometimes four. After the ice finally reaches its maximum extent, it collapses with an almost unseemly haste — icecaps built up in fits and starts over 80,000 years recede in less than a tenth of that time." |
| Here's another case of correct but misleading. That's because the temperature chart on page 297 goes from right to left; the present is at the left edge. Reading it that way, you can see how the temperature falls in fits and starts, then spikes abruptly in much less time. |
| Page 338: | "Impressed by the work of Jethro Tull he introduced turnips as a crop for cattle to eat..." |
| The work of Jethro Tull is nowhere described here. I'm sure the British rock group is not what's referred to... |
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