Adventures of a Young Naturalist: The Zoo Quest Expeditions, by David Attenborough

Category: Non-Fiction;  Rating: 3 out of 5;  Tags: David Attenborough, Travel, Nature, Zoology

At the age of 26, David Attenborough was a television producer with a degree in zoology, and an idea for a television show.  He and a staff member from the London Zoo would travel to distant lands on animal collecting expeditions, filming the capture of exotic animals for the zoo’s displays.  Artful pitches to the BBC and the Zoo resulted in funding for the idea, and the team set off.  Zoos wouldn’t do this today, but things were different in the 1950’s.

With youthful endurance and enthusiasm, Attenborough travelled to the jungles of Guyana, the island of Komodo, and the rivers of Paraguay.  They talked their camera equipment through customs, hired a jeep or boat, and headed off into the wilderness, trusting that things would work out.  If the jeep broke down, they bolted it back together with parts scavenged from elsewhere on the vehicle.  If they missed the boat back to town while up a jungle river, they trusted that another would come along.  If supplies ran low, they lived off the land.

A multi-talented man, not only did Attenborough endure harsh travel conditions, but after each collecting expedition he presented the animals in the studio on live television, and wrote a book about the trip (this book is a reprinted version of three book originally published in 1956, 1957 and 1959).  Egrets and hummingbirds, anteaters and armadillos, sloths and snakes, Komodo dragons and capybara were all encountered, and many collected for the zoo and TV series.  Attenborough’s interest in the animals, and in sharing that interest with the public, comes through in the writing, just as it does in his engaging TV and film presentations.

 

 

Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster, by Adam Higginbotham

Category: Non-Fiction;  Rating: 4 out of 5;  Tags: Chernobyl, Nuclear Accidents, History, Soviet Union

Again and again, I am amazed by the amount of research that goes into writing a book like this.  Adam Higginbotham has written an extensive, thorough, and exhaustively researched account of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.  Using declassified documents, interviews with those involved, letters, and other sources, he has pieced together what may well be the definitive account of what happened that night in April, 1986.

The original investigation blamed the operators for not following procedures, but those procedures would have required perfect execution by the operators for the duration of their shifts.  Frequent adjustments were required to keep the reactor under control, exhausting the operators; the switches on the control panel needed constant replacement, worn out from so much use.  Relentless, impossible demands from the Soviet bureaucracy led to a culture of lies and shortcuts, in which staff became used to ignoring the rules and instead did what they knew would work.

The RBMK-1000 reactor itself had serious flaws, which the designers failed to acknowledge or address.  In the USSR, previous nuclear accidents were covered up and treated as state secrets, even from the specialists who could have learned from them.  The problems with the design were only compounded by construction problems.  Pipes corroded, joints came loose, parts and materials arrived late, or not at all, and some was of such poor quality it was thrown away.  To save money, the designers omitted the containment building used in reactors in the West, which keeps radiation from escaping after a serious incident.  It was an accident waiting to happen.

As usual, a series of errors led to the accident.  A test of the coolant system was planned, but started late.  The shift that had been briefed on the test went home.  An operator on the new shift made an error, and the reactor started to lose power.  They should have shut the reactor down, but didn’t.  The operator withdrew control rods to compensate.  Power rose, and the test proceeded.  When coolant circulation slowed during the test, the nuclear reaction increased because of a design flaw.  Another flaw meant that the emergency shutdown method, instead of immediately halting the reaction, briefly increased it.  The reactor overheated and exploded, blowing the 2000 tonne concrete and steel biological shield off its mounts, scattering burning chunks of the reactor core around the facility, and sending a radioactive plume drifting across Europe.

Higginbotham captures the drama of the explosion, the heroic efforts to contain the molten reactor core and clean up the contaminated areas, and also the cover-ups, blame and scapegoating that followed.  Full of technical detail and personal stories, it’s a gripping account of one of the biggest accidents of the 20th century.

 

The Curve of Time, by M. Wylie Blanchet

Category: Non-Fiction;  Rating: 3 out of 5;  Tags: Boating, British Columbia, Nature, Travel

Muriel Wylie Blanchet lived from 1891 to 1961.  Widowed in 1927, she spent her summers packed cheek by jowl with her five children aboard a 25-foot boat, cruising the waters of Vancouver Island and the mainland coast of British Columbia.  Her account of those adventures was not published until 1961, in Edinburgh, and the first Canadian edition waited until 1968.  The book is a classic of Canadian literature, describing the area’s vanishing indigenous culture and natural beauty with insight and sensitivity.

This was a time when you could cruise into a cove and expect complete solitude.  The odd person built a cabin on the shores of the wilderness, but not many.  Encounters with bears and cougars were not unusual.  Traditional native villages still stood, with their carved poles and community houses, empty in the summer while the winter-time residents were away, and open to respectful exploration by summer boaters.  Messages were carried from point to point by boat, and sometimes garbled in the process.

This kind of travel required independence and resourcefulness; you had to know how to fix your own diesel engine, find your own way on the charts, navigate thick fog and racing tidal currents, and know where you could fill up with fuel.

Part history, part travelogue, part family biography, the book makes you want to push off and start simply messing about in boats.

Spying on Whales: The Past, Present and Future of Earth’s Most Awesome Creatures, by Nick Pyenson

Category: Non-Fiction;  Rating: 3 out of 5;  Tags: Whales, Biology, Fossils, Paleontology

The facts about whales are anything but dry.  Whales evolved on land 40 to 50 million years ago, starting out the size of a large dog, with four legs, teeth, a nose in the usual place (on the tip of the snout instead of on the back of the head), and perhaps fur.  Blue whales are the most massive animals ever to have lived.  That’s ever, in the history of life on the planet.  Some whales can live more than twice as long as humans do now.  They communicate in whale song, but we can’t understand what they’re saying.  We almost never see them, except when they surface to breathe.  They hunt cooperatively.  They have multi-chambered stomachs, like cows, and are most closely related to hippos (among living animals).  They have belly buttons.  More than three million whales were killed in the 20th century.

The facts and statistics don’t convey the thrill of examining not just one, but dozens of fantastically preserved, complete fossil whale skeletons in Chile, and then figuring out why numerous whales were beached in the same place at least four separate times over thousands of years.  The numbers don’t give you the ache in your back that you get from measuring fossil whale bones using ladders, forklifts, and movers’ straps.  And they don’t fill your nose with the odour of a dead whale taken apart on the deck of an Icelandic whaling boat, while you study still-mysterious parts of whale anatomy.

Nick Pyenson has given us a glimpse into his life as curator of marine mammal fossils at the Smithsonian, showing us something of what it’s like to be a paleontologist specializing in whales.  Whales and fossils are both pretty cool; a book about fossilized whales is doubly so.