Jonathan Franzen isn’t a science writer. No, he’s something better: an essayist who writes about those aspects of science he has closely observed. In his latest essay collection, The End of the End of the Earth (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Franzen brings eloquence to the subject of ornithology (birdwatching is his globe-trotting hobby) and the effects of climate change.
When one of those essays was first published in the New Yorker, Franzen drew flak as a “climate change denier.” He was attacked by people who never read the essay and—given the stupidity of their comments—cannot or will not read any text longer than 140 characters. Franzen’s argument is not that climate change is unreal but against the platitudes of activists pinning the future on false hope.
According to Franzen, there is no evidence that “humanity is capable—politically, psychologically, ethically, economically—of slashing carbon emissions quickly and deeply enough to change anything.” He might be right, but then what? He concedes, “Pretending that the Paris Accord could avert catastrophe” is “understandable as a tactic” to motivate and keep hope alive. However, Franzen urges environmentalists to speak frankly on how to prepare for the deluge. Some groups have done that while most others prattle on, raising money and issuing statements whose redundancy only plays into the hands of climate change deniers.
The End of the End of the Earth includes writings on other topics. In a short essay, Franzen recounts a recurring nightmare he once had of desperately piloting a jetliner through the skyscrapers of Manhattan—a few years went by and 911 happened. Doom is on his mind. Franzen’s pessimism only darkened while on an Antarctic penguin-watching cruise where, “sitting in the lounge of a ship burning three and a half gallons of fuel per minute,” he listened to a lecturer extol the benefits of farmers markets and LED bulbs. He’s peevish but has a point. Some of Franzen’s beloved bird species might readjust their flight plans in light of climate change. Humans could have a harder time.
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Einstein’s Monsters: The Life and Times of Black Holes (W.W. Norton), by Chris Impey
Einstein’s Monsters describes research at science’s outer limits with clarity. The focus is on black holes, once deemed impossible by some astrophysicists and now shown to be fairly commonplace. Still, they appear anomalous, even if, as University of Arizona astronomy professor Chris Impey writes, they are unlikely to be portals for time travel. In proposing what they probably are, Impey summarizes Einstein’s ideas and other theories on the space-time and the distorting effects of gravity. Einstein’s Monsters is filled with interesting facts, among them Robert Oppenheimer’s pathfinding work in astrophysics before he turned to making the atom bomb.
Underbug: An Obsessive Tale of Termites and Technology (Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux), by Lisa Margonelli
Nobody likes termites. They eat our homes, gnaw at our trees and in 2016, they crept into an Indian bank and devoured the money. Their advocate, Lisa Margonelli, tells us that contrary to reputation, most species are not invasive pests. They are hive creatures who have adapted well to many environments. And according to her, the wood-digesting bugs may have something to teach us. But first, as reported in Underbug, we must learn about them. One problem she finds is that scientists have continually projected human social-political ideas onto the hives, whose descriptions in learned journals have ranged from monarchist to racist, socialist and feminist. Maybe the bugs are apolitical? Rehearsing all the theories of termite life that have been offered, Margonelli is “surprised by how many different versions of science” there are and how the trendy quantitative methodology is “running up against the limits to abstracting life’s complexity.”
Unthinkable: An Extraordinary Journey Through the World’s Strangest Brains (Ecco), by Helen Thomson
Following the path of Oliver Sacks, Helen Thomson sought out people whose strange behavior—their mental anomalies—might cast light on the workings of the brain. More so than Sacks, Thomson, an award-winning British science writer, was determined to see the people in her case studies not “from the eyes of a neurologist” but “as a friend might.” She writes engagingly of people with extraordinary recall. Memory is essential to our personhood, yet, she discovers, having too much of it can be exhausting. Also, a person with extraordinary memory for numbers can be hapless in recalling other things. Thomson flew to Denver to meet a woman who is continually disoriented and apt to lose her way from bedroom to bath. Her problem began in childhood and she developed cunning compensation strategies that helped her navigate through life. Whether or not Thomson achieved a “friend’s” level of understanding, she collects some interesting cases and concludes with an important idea: objectivity is crucial in science, yet “subjectivity is its flesh and blood.”
