OPENING LINE:
They had discovered a lost world above California, and it was unexplored.
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Richard Preston is an exciting writer. He wrote the terrifying true account of an Ebola virus outbreak in his 1994 book The Hot Zone. The Wild Trees is just as powerful. It is a love story between Steve Sillett and Marie Antoine, two scientists who come together and discover the incredible secrets hiding in the tops of the ancient coastal redwoods. Before their work, arborists didn’t think there was much to be found in these canopies. This new breed of scientists, however, discover creatures who spend their whole lives without ever touching the ground. The giant redwoods that these explorers and their colleagues learn to climb and study are so massive that they literally have other trees of different species growing out of their limbs. Thirty stories above the earth there is another forest rising from the tops of the Sequoia sempervirens. Some of these trees are almost 2,000 years old. They survive periodic fires that can leave charred caves at their bases large enough for cars to drive through. The tallest of these trees was cut down in 1886 and was reported to be 424 feet. And of course the greatest threat to this glorious species is us: an estimated 95% of the ancient redwood forests have been cut down since the 1850s. Preston learned to climb these trees so he could follow the scientists into the hearts of the giants. He has written a book that takes the reader with him.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: The Wild Trees
OPENING LINE:
There’s a photo on my wall of a woman I’ve never met, its left corner torn and patched together with tape.
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Rebecca Skloot almost failed her high school biology class. But her teacher told her about Henrietta Lacks and HeLa cells and then and there she planned one day to write a book about the subject. After getting a BS in biology and a Masters in journalism she became a science writer, and wrote this book. Henreitta Lacks was a poor Africian American woman, the daughter of a tobacco grower from small town Virginia. She was raised mostly by her grandfather, married her cousin and had five children. In 1951 she died at Johns Hopkins Hospital of cervical cancer. What makes her famous, though is the fact that some of the cells taken from her tumor became the first human cells to survive and grow in a culture medium. As such they helped make the polio vacine and have been involved in countless medical studies. These remarkable cells are known as HeLa cells. In the 1970′s her family found out that Henrietta’s cells had been used in this way, though they did not understand and no one explained to them. This book is about Henietta’s decendents learning of the importance of the cells and beginnig to pull themselves out of poverty. It is written with an even-hand and positive tone. Read it if you are interested in science, social justice, or family histories.
GREAT LINE:
Small rooms and houses discipline the mind, large ones weaken it.
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For the last 30 years of his life Leonardo da Vinci kept notes on the various questions and ideas that attracted his fantastic mind. These notes eventually reached 5,000 pages – almost all written backwards and illustrated with sketches. He may have planned to publish them, but at his death they were sold, lost, stolen, and misplaced. It wasn’t until the 19th century that scholars were able to publish them as a single work, arranging the notes by subject and calling it The Notebooks. So this book is literally just notes, some of them a single sentence and some a few pages long, grouped into broad subjects. The first volume covers how to be an artist, including drawing (it’s best to stand away from what you’re drawing at a distance three times its height,) light and shade, perspective, colors, human anatomy for artists, botany for painters, paints, and how to criticize your own work. The second volume covers science, including geology (fossils on mountaintops prove mountains have been lifted from the ocean floor,) weather, astronomy, hydraulics, inventions, war, and engineering. This is probably not a book to read all at once, but rather to dip into now and then, and reflect on the amazing thought and curiosity of one of the world’s greatest geniuses. It is also interesting to see how da Vinci did not spend his time. There is nothing about politics even though he was born in the Florence of Machiavelli; no artist’s gossip, not even about Michelangelo; only rare criticism of other people’s ideas; and – needless to say – nothing about the occult.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci
OPENING LINES:
No one knows what brought the huge animal down. … At some point its knees buckled and it dropped to the ground with a seismic thud … It was almost certainly still alive …
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William Northdurft weaves together two narratives, German paleontologist Ernst Freiher Stromer von Reichenback’s 1911 discovery of fossil dinosaurs in the Egyptian desert and the expedition of a group of contemporary paleontologists hoping to rediscover that fossil bed. Stromer had been the first to describe many of the species he brought back to Europe. Yet Stromer’s entire collection was obliterated during allied bombing raids in WWII, and no one any longer knew quite where his dinosaurs had been found. For a non-scientist looking over facts and diagrams science can look staid, but when you get into the history it takes on more color – the fleas in the tents, the gigantic bones poking out of a hillside, the denunciations of rivals, the thefts. Nor does Northdurft neglect the old monsters themselves. Did those long-necked dinosaurs munch from tree tops like giraffes? Or was it more efficient for them just to keep their heads low and turn their bodies in a gigantic arc, eating and eating and eating without hardly having to move a step? An engaging mix of travelogue, history, and science.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: The Lost Dinosaurs of Egypt