590-599: Zoology. A Not-At-All Silent Spring

I've been enjoying being an amateur naturalist! I've learned fun facts about creatures ancient and modern, gigantic and tiny, sentient and... didn't I learn that plants may be sentient too? Zoology is a great way to finish up the Science century of the Dewey Decimal System. Still working under Covid-19 restrictions, I couldn't peruse library shelves. But birds are, contrary to popular opinion, animals (I mean, what else would they be? Vegetables? Minerals?), and a hot topic this spring. Mourning doves nested on the office windowsill. A cardinal family moved into the bush outside the downstairs bathroom window. There was a hawk in my oak tree earlier today. And this spring is anything but silent, as decreased traffic from the pandemic seemed to encourage the birds to appear out of nowhere in every tree in town, singing their heads off from 4 a.m. till after dark every day.

Everyone's been talking about two new bird books: What It's Like to Be a Bird, by David Sibley, and The Bird Way, by Jennifer Ackerman. We also have a beautiful reproduction of Audubon's Birds of America. The first thing I learned from all these books is that there are a lot of different kinds of birds! I think I can identify about 20 or 25 North American species, but there are hundreds, and then all the others around the world! And each one has its own song and its own behavior patterns.

Let's compare and contrast our two new neighbors. First, the cardinals. In March there was much hopping around in the half-dead hemlock trees out back, with multiple males and one female sitting on the evergreen branches singing like they were in a Christmas movie.  Finally, Ms. Cardinal made a selection amongst her suitors-- I have no idea how! Scientists think the crest that the male can raise and lower, and the richness of his bright coloration, may have something to do with it. The new pair built a pile of twigs in the heart of a bush, inaccessible and almost invisible even once we knew where to look. In fact, we did not even realize it was there until after the babies were hatched and sticking their little beaks up in the air like cartoon birdies chirping "feed me, feed me!" They kept Mama busy flying back and forth to provide for them, while Daddy continued to hop around the hemlocks, standing guard. And then they were gone-- Mama, Daddy, and the babies had vacated the premises when we weren't even looking.

The mourning doves were different from first to last. We became aware of their activites when one of them starting sitting next to the open window of my husband Mark's upstairs office, uttering the beautiful "hoo-hoo-hoo" that is so instantly recognizable... for hours at a time. Apparently, that was Mr. Dove's way of saying, "I've got a home for you-hoo-hoo." Mrs. Dove (they typically mate for life) found it agreeable, probably because someone else-- someone much smaller-- had already built a tidy little mud-lined picture-book nest right at the corner, so they just needed to build an addition to accommodate their size. Their "improvements" were-- well-- not much of an improvement. Certainly when they were done the nest was bigger, but it was, as the Audubon society says, "flimsy" in appearance, and it seemed certain that Mr., Mrs., and any little bundles of joy to follow would surely fall right off the window ledge at the first storm. But Mrs. Dove boldly took up her post.

Mrs. Dove liked nothing better than to look askance at Mark all day long, glaring at him out of one beady eye, just daring him to come any closer to her little darlings. She did not leave her post for a solid three weeks-- two weeks to hatch, and another week just to keep the newborns warm. I thought I heard some fluttering outside the window one evening which might have been Mr. Dove coming to relieve her, as I have heard they do. But during the day, it was Mrs. Dove's shift, and she spent at least 12 hours sitting squarely on top of her lean-to nest.

Around the beginning of week four, we noticed that Mrs. Dove had edged off the nest a bit-- always keeping her back between us and the babies, and always giving us the evil eye if we approached to try to peek in. Despite her best efforts, we got a glimpse of the little ones sticking their beaks in her throat to drink the "crop milk" she secreted. Pretty soon they were big enough that their heads stuck over the top of the nest and she couldn't completely hide them. Now they are fledged and don't drink "milk" any more, and she and the Mr. will sometimes leave them unattended for a minute or two, presumably because it takes both of the adults to rustle up enough seeds for a family of four.

Around the same we began to hear a new sound in our neighborhood, almost like a gull's cry. I finally learned what it was one day when a hawk was mobbed right to the oak tree in the front yard. He sat on a branch for a minute and unmistakeably was the source of the repeated caw. Since then, I've realized that he works a territory about three blocks square. Imagine my surprise when I heard him calling 100 yards in front of me, and then heard the distinctive crashing and rustling of another hawk coming in low through the trees right over me and to the right. With all the trees in full leaf, I hear more bird activity than I see.

David Sibley

That's why I was particularly grateful for what I could learn about bird sounds from Ackerman's book. I learned that species usually make more than one call or song, that each member of a species has a slightly different song, and each individual's songs can be varied to suit the purpose. Even a simple, maybe not-so-bright bird like the mourning dove has one sound it makes at rest and another when landing or taking off, and the trademark coo can be of varying lengths. Birds vocalize to identify themselves, to find their flocks, to warn not only their flock but other birds and even other species of danger, to claim and identify territory, and to communicate during migration. The decrease in traffic noise due to Covid-19 may be one reason for our not-so-silent spring-- when birds can learn from each other and take turns standing guard, they are safer and can eat more and reproduce more!

580-589: Botany. The Hidden Life of Trees, by Peter Wohlleben

Early this year, I read The Overstory, by Richard Powers, a work of such stunning beauty that I had to keep putting it down to absorb its images. It was a novel about trees, really, although human characters slipped in and out of the lyrical descriptions of growth, life and decay on a grand scale. I read it with my phone handy so I could look up some of the unfamiliar species mentioned, and felt my heart rate slow as it aligned with the pace of life in the forest. I also learned some very interesting facts-- or at least I hoped they were facts. Powers alluded to a number of books in the novel and endnotes. On further research, The Hidden Life of Trees seemed like the one that might have inspired him most directly.

For one thing, The Hidden Life of Trees is itself almost a fictionalized account of forest biology. The tone is breezy in the extreme, and Wohlleben makes free with anthropomorphic references to trees' thoughts, emotions and plans. Trees are pictured as having etiquette, going to school and screaming. There are mother trees, street kids, and, most importantly, tree communities. The tone of the book has caused a lot of controversy and frustration, especially in Germany and France, and certainly made me question whether the author really was doing science.

But, as it turns out, the "controversy" around The Hidden Life of Trees could really just be better described as "irritation." No botanist is accusing Wohlleben of getting his facts wrong, just of presenting the information in a more informal way than is usual for science writing.

And there is a lot of information! Just about every tree behavior and aspect of the life of the forest that The Overstory depicts can be found in this book. All the astounding tales of tree symbiosis, cooperation, adaptation and interaction with other species are factually accurate. Trees do make sounds and emit electrical impulses. They do sense the passage of time and, of course, the vital changes in available light that will affect their ability to photosynthesize. They do form complex ecosystems with other beings, from mammals to microorganisms, and exhibit coordinated behaviors. And, most impressively, they really do live for hundreds, sometimes thousands of years. 

On a walk the other day, I saw this interesting example of a tree that Wohlleben would call a "street kid," a tree that has been planted in the narrow space between sidewalk and street and is having trouble finding any place to send its roots.  Roots need oxygen just like branches do, which is why most houseplants don't like to sit in water-- they need to breathe! Apparently the ground under streets and sidewalks is compacted by machinery before paving. Of course that makes it difficult to grow through and also eliminates air pockets. That's why roots end up in water and sewer line-- they are just trying to get some air!
This same tree also may be a good example of one that can reproduce from its root system. The root is covered with bright green sprouts with tiny leaves. Are they hoping to become trees, or do they think they are branches coming from the trunk? Maybe that is a distinction without a difference. It will be interesting to keep an eye on these little sprouts over the summer and see how big they get.

This delightful and easy read explained many other things I have observed in the garden and neighborhood. For example, some trees- oaks notoriously-- produce tannin in their leaves. That's the same thing that is in tea, that makes it bitter if you let it steep too long. It's also the reason that wine is often aged in oak-- the tannins are considered a flavor enhancer. It turns out that the tannin is a defense mechanism against fungus and enables oaks to survive wounds such as lightning strikes that would weaken and expose other kinds of trees. Unfortunately, it also is disagreeable to grasses and other herbaceous plants, which is why gardening under an oak tree is a constant argument with nature. Wohlleben is all about not arguing with nature, and would, I'm sure, advocate for cooperating instead, by choosing plants that love shade and don't mind tannin, like ferns and hostas.

Gardening also helped me relate to this book because trees are like smaller plants in many ways. Some of them can reproduce vegetatively, from their roots, as do dandelions or mint. All of them can reproduce from seed and have all kinds of different schemes for getting their seeds fertilized and distributed. Seeds might have wings to fly out from under the source tree's shadow (as dandelion seeds do), or they might come encased in delicious fruit (as berries are) so that some helpful animal will come along and carry them off to a new location-- perhaps digesting them first! Some trees just drop their seeds right under their own shade and let a battle for sunlight ensue, as do many flowers.

But one thing is true of every tree (and every flower): trees produce seeds in reckless excess. The quantity of maple keys or sharp little acorns or pinecones that one tree can drop on a lawn is truly astonishing and seems completely unnecessary for the survival of the species! Personally, I sweep maple keys off the porch, pull out maple tree sprouts from the flower beds, fill bags with pinecones for mulching, and hurt my feet on acorns that blanket the ground, wondering why trees have to be so messy. But the consistent observer of nature can learn that squirrels and other little animals appreciate this abundance, even if we don't. They are busy all year, snatching up the free lunch that falls at their feet.

In the wild, tree seeds face just as many obstacles to growth as they do when humans such as myself are actively trying to fight back the forest. Most are eaten by those little animals. Those that survive to sprout will usually be eaten by rabbits and other medium-sized animals. The deer will probably take care of the rest; they can eat a new tree up to three feet high. Even if a baby tree manages to survive long enough to come off the lunch menu for the animals of the forest, it will probably be getting very little light on the forest floor and will therefore be weak and susceptible to insects and fungus. It may very well die and return to the earth in the form of humus. Given all these obstacles, although a tree will produce more than a million seeds in its lifetime, often only ONE of them will live to maturity!

The abundance of seeds should not be a source of dismay to me, even when it's inconvenient. After all, like the squirrels, I owe my dinner to the fact that plants of all kinds are designed to produce far over and above the number of seeds needed to perpetuate their species. I eat corn, rice, wheat and oats-- those are all seeds. I eat meat and dairy products from animals that ate those seeds, too. I eat peaches and strawberries and grapes that contain seeds. Really, the whole animal kingdom is dependent on the fact that one plant can make many seeds, many more than it needs for its own purposes!

A wild forest supports a tremendous amount of life, both visible and invisible, and it also supports our souls. A deciduous forest is full of birdsong and the rustle of creatures great (deer) and small (chipmunks, frogs) moving through the brush and leaf litter on the forest floor. We enter and feel that we have found a place outside time and all that's merely human. Life of a completely foreign kind is busy all around us, as our breathing slows to match the scale of business that is conducted 100 feet in the air and unfolds over centuries. In a healthy, natural forest, the trees are at peace, because they are well-watered and their balanced ecology protects them from insect, fungus and animal attack. Leaves are eating sunlight, and mosses are eating dust, and the tree is breathing in my unwanted carbon dioxide and breathing out oxygen. The light in a forest is actually green under the canopy, since the leaves have absorbed every other color.

A pine forest has a deeper hush to it. The needles underfoot absorb footfalls and make the soil too acidic to support wild undergrowth. There is less food for birds and small mammals, and so, less rustling and less birdsong. The forest seems to soak up sound as it presides over a silence that has existed for longer than any human life. Furthermore, pine needles dispense phytoncides that disinfect the atmosphere and discourage mosquitos, while the breath of the trees and the shelter of their branches creates a microclimate that provides welcome respite from extreme weather. In any kind of well-balanced forest, our hearts find shalom.

All these processes are revealed in The Hidden Life of Trees. The knowledge and wisdom of this book will enrich your next walk in the woods and your relationship to our largest and oldest neighbors on this planet. Highly recommended!

570-579: Biology. River out of Eden, by Richard Dawkins, and The Gene: An Intimate History, by Siddhartha Muherjee

When I had to pick a book on biology in the midst of the 2020 Covid-19 nationwide shutdown, without access to a public library, I was hard-pressed to even know where to begin. E-book libraries are not organized by Dewey Decimal number, sadly, and the entire topic of "Science" yielded only about 150 titles-- less than I would expect my local library to carry on biology alone!

Fortunately, my husband is a science buff, and as he perused the limited offerings, he got very excited about The Gene. After all, it's just been released as a Ken Burns documentary. All the usual suspects are raving about it. Just two problems: it was waitlisted at the library (yes, e-books have waitlists; licensing issues, don't ask), AND it's a jillion pages long.

Both problems were easily solved by a certain mega-retailer's policy of providing samples of e-books free of charge. In this case, the entire first section, focused on history, was available. I think that was a solid 150 e-book pages and got me all the way from Aristotle to the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and the Feeble-Minded. That was plenty to be going on with.

My husband's other suggestion was that I read a book by Richard Dawkins. "Why in the world would I want to do that?" I asked, mindful of Dawkins' reputation as a militant evangelist for atheism. My husband answered that the book in question had been given to him by a medical doctor we went to church with, following a conversation about creation and evolution. "Oh, if Dr. Palmer recommended it, that's all right," I thought, observing also the book's blessed brevity, and took the plunge.

Muherjee and Dawkins make surprisingly good companions. Both have highly readable styles and clear agendas. Muherjee wants you to understand what DNA is, how genes were discovered, and no doubt many other fascinating facts about the mechanics of heredity... featured in the five sections that I was too cheap to pay for and too impatient to read (I'm still in the 500's, people, and I'm not getting any younger!).

Dawkins, who I'm going to focus on from here on out, just wants to prove one thing: that God is unnecessary. Why does he use a Bible word in the title of his book and pepper the whole thing with references to Eve and perfection and "God's utility function"? Maybe to get the attention of people like Dr. Palmer and then me... or maybe because the world just intuitively appears to be... designed. Just saying.

He writes, "Evolution is very possibly not, in actual fact, always gradual. But it must be gradual when it is being used to explain the coming into existence of complicated, apparently designed objects, like eyes. For if it is not gradual in these cases, it ceases to have any explanatory power at all. Without gradualness in these cases, we are back to miracle, which is simply a synonym for the total absence of explanation." This quote makes it very clear what Dawkins wants to do: not prove that gradual evolution was and is, in fact, the only mechanism of speciation, but to prove that it is a sufficient explanation for all the complexity of the life we see around us.

However. I didn't read the book to argue with it. I don't have the background. I read it because I had to read something, and it seemed like a book of general knowledge that general people ought to have. Looked at as an introduction to the concept of the origin of species via evolution, I would say it was pretty helpful. It cleared up some misunderstandings for me, even as it raised other questions.

One thing it didn't do was challenge my faith. In fact, I enjoyed knowing more details about how evolution could produce such detailed organisms as the eye. I loved the analogy of DNA as digital  information that works like a computer program, because it enabled me to see God not only as a great artist and a great engineer, but also as a great information technologist.

I even appreciated learning about the difference between analog and digital information. Turns out analog is like waves or spectrum colors or anything else that seems clear until it's not. So we all know what blue is and what green is. But what happens in between? Shades of grey indeed! Well, even though life is analog, it seems the DNA that programs cells is digital! I guess it's just like this photo, which uses binary code to depict an analog gradient. Maybe I'm just easily amused, but I think that's cool!

As I'm writing this, I sit in my yard listening to birds and watching bees visit flowers. Thinking of evolution as an ongoing process, I consider whether the wildflowers that I allow to grow in my lawn may evolve in response to the pressure not only of pollinator and animal activity, but also to my actions with the lawnmower. Will only the showiest flowers, the ones in sheltered places, or those that grow lower than the mower blade survive to reproduce? If the same lawn is tended in the same way for generations, will the violets be shorter and the buttercups even taller and brighter?

I also consider the evolution of viruses and of insects that are making headlines today-- "superbugs" in two senses. I remember the mass extinction events I read about when I was in the Dinosaurium-- sort of the opposite side of the same coin. And I wonder: what makes us think that we are living at the end point of the processes God put in place "in the beginning"? Both the direct actions of humans and the pressures that all species put on each other... couldn't they result in further changes in species that we think of as having "arrived" at their final form?

I have a few questions that remain unanswered. I particularly don't understand the course of human evolution so far. Presumably other books address this question: if evolution is driven by survival of the fittest, why are humans so ill-fitted for survival in the wild? Why wasn't astigmatism eliminated from our gene pool millenia ago? What in the world made the absence of fur a survival trait for our ancestors? Why are we so poorly armed, with nails instead of claws and weak teeth instead of nice pointy fangs? What's so great about being bipedal? I'm not saying a theory of special creation particularly answers this question, I'm just saying it's a question!

Dawkins does not address this question, but he does speak to the issue of how the handicaps of aging have survived the pressures of survival. "Everybody is descended from an unbroken line of ancestors all of whom were at some time in their lives young but many of whom were never old. So we inherit whatever it takes to be young, but not necessarily whatever it takes to be old." I have sometimes thought that survival of the fittest was not all it is cracked up to be, leaving intact arthritis, heart disease, and all kinds of other useless and maladaptive conditions. But now I understand that since these things don't typically impact survival until AFTER we have passed on our DNA, they wouldn't be selected against even in the most hostile environments. That still doesn't explain why four-year-olds need glasses, though!

Taken together, both these books taught me more about the mechanics of the origins of species without turning me into a mechanist. They really exemplify the whole reason I undertook this project in the first place: I wanted to learn a little bit about a lot of things, things I might not expect to be interested in. After all, it's the Bible that tells us that "It is the glory of God to conceal a matter, But the glory of kings is to search out a matter." (Proverbs 25:2, NASB)

560-569: Fossils and Dinosaurs. Dinosaurium, by Chris Wormell and Lily Murray

I have been longing to own the whole Welcome to the Museum series ever since I saw Botanicum in a museum gift shop. So closed libraries plus 560 in the Dewey system equals actually buying Dinosaurium with actual dollars, to have and to hold. It's a beautiful book and deserves to be owned and savored.

The first thing I learned upon opening the book  is that it's currently believed that the continents were in a totally different configuration in the whole Mesozoic Era, which includes the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. So, that's weird. I mean, it's one thing to see a news item that says that tropical fossils were found in Antarctica; it's another to look at maps that are allegedly Earth but are pretty much unrecognizable.

The main thing I learned was that it is now believed that many famous dinos, notably Tyrannosaurs, had some kind of covering on their skin more or less like feathers. It's interesting to speculate how something as complex as a feather could be a product of time and natural selection and to learn that feather-like structures could have other benefits even if they don't provide flight. After all, flightless birds do still exist and seem to find their lovely skin coverings useful!

I will also throw in a fun fact that I did not learn from this book but from one of my adult sons: Coelacanths, once associated only with the late Cretaceous period, are still around. They are not dinosaurs but ugly, inedible, rare fish.

Nothing could be finer on a quarantine afternoon than sitting on your porch with an enormous book full of dinosaur pictures on your lap. Well worth the investment!

To See the World in a Grain of: Salt, by Mark Kurlansky

"To see the world in a grain of sand" is the opening line of William Blake's "Auguries of Innocence", which is both irrelevant and impossible not to think of when you read a history of the world through a lens of salt. The author has written two other books, one about cod and the other about Basques, and the topics showcase his unique ability to turn narrow focus on one detail --a mineral, a fish, a small and mysterious people group living in isolation and speaking a language unrelated to any other in the vicinity-- into the long view of world history.

The topics intersect: salt is apparently a strategically important natural resource partly because it can be used to preserve cod. The Basques were great whalers who followed the Vikings to the Faroe Islands to fish cod so they could salt it and build their fortunes on the resulting preserved food. They may have even passed Iceland and reached Newfoundland in search of cod lands. And Mark Kurlansky is right there, letting salt (and Basques, and cod) lead you across the Atlantic Ocean, in his very accurately titled Salt: A World History.

He also takes us to ancient China, where impact drills were used to find both salt brine and (accidentally) the natural gas that could be lit to boil it down-- this around 250 B.C. He's where the Celts invented salt pork-- ham-- only to be defeated by the Romans, who claimed all the salt mines and invented salad and salaries. He's where the Anglo-Saxons peppered, as it were, their lands with saltworks, with names ending in -wich like Norwich and Nantwich. He's also where William the Conqueror destroyed these wiches to, as it were, crush rebellion and seal the conquest. The salt-destroying strategy was later used by the Northern forces to weaken the Confederacy during the Civil War-- without salt, the South could not preserve food long enough to get it to the troops. Salt was a weapon of war as late as the Indian independence from Britain, when Ghandi, instead of leading a tea party, led an illegal salt-harvesting expedition (for the same reason-- to protest unreasonable taxes and restrictions on production).

Which brings us to the geology of salt-making. It appears you can get salt two main ways: you can evaporate salty water until it precipitates out, or you can dig it out of rocky deposits that are usually found in veins, like coal. Occasionally, these salt deposits are the size of mountains, either exposed above ground or hidden by layers of other rock. Where they are exposed, of course they are highly subject to erosion; where they are hidden, the capacity to extract the mineral is limited by the weight above the deposit.

Salt mines have even become tourist attractions. They can be adventurous, beautiful, and healthful-- not only is salt a preservative, it's also a disinfectant, and people who spend time in the mines report relief from viruses and bacterial infections. For the same reason, my dentist recommends a salt rinse for irritated gums.

Salt has also motivated the construction of roads and canals, since money could only be made if large quantities of it could be gotten from where it is to where it isn't. Camels were attempted in Nevada, to the dismay of the salt miners, their other animals, and the camels themselves.

There are many kinds of salt. The color is caused by the presence of other minerals and impurities: the clay from the earth the salt evaporates on, iron oxide in Himalayan salt, minerals and even heavy metals not refined out of "natural" sea salt. There are also many different textures that people come to appreciate: the fine, even cubes of commercial table salt are great for baking, while chunkier, uneven "kosher salt" or flaky sea salt may provide a bigger "punch" of flavor. One thing's for sure-- reading this book really makes you want to eat some pretzels or popcorn. Iodine, of course, is an impurity added to salt on purpose as a public health measure, and has greatly reduced the incidence of goiter worldwide.

Salt is a recurring metaphor in the teachings of Jesus. What does salt do? It preserves and disinfects-- it prevents decay and disease. It provokes thirst and is, along with many other minerals, essential to health. It tastes good and enhances the flavor of everything it's added to. And one other thing: it cannot, in fact, lose its saltiness. It can become diluted, it can become adulterated, but sodium chloride will always retain the properties of salt. Those are the facts about salt-- make of them what you will.

550-559: Geology and Meteorology Book Haul

Lesson learned: don't underestimate your local branch library. I thought I did pretty well here.

And this doesn't even include what was too heavy to carry home! I could have chosen books about the exploration of Mars, so I guess all rocks are included, even ones on other planets. Also, water and air are big topics. Sam Kean, who wrote The Disappearing Spoon, which I kind of read last time, also wrote a book about air, which, seriously? NPR called it "breezy" (LOL), and I got enough of that before, so I passed on that one.

So, top to bottom: The Audubon Society, best known for its interest in birds, seems to make field guides for just about every natural phenomenon, 20 in all, at least two found in this section: Weather and Rocks & Minerals. Of course I wanted a full-color enumeration of the 30 pages worth of different kinds of snowstorms and ice storms found on our continent! I won't hold myself to reading the "Essays" at the beginning, but I may have to read some of the "Text Accounts' at the end, especially of  "Mixed Skies,""Optical Phenomena," and "Obstructions to Vision." Those do beg further explanation!

Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky was a "Best Book of 2012" in our little library, so I guess I'm late to this party. It attracted my attention because of course in church we are always talking about salt, as in, being salt. The first few pages have already captured my attention, as the author describes the surprising behavior of a rock of salt he brought back from Spain that reacted to sun, humidity, metals... and licking. So that's why chemistry and geology are right next to each other!

Now take a deep breath before you read the full title of the last book in the pile. Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28.800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them. Donovan Hohn's subtitle reeled me in when he mentioned that he was a character in the story.... because you know I love stunt memoirs! The book is written in a companionable first-person style and seems to touch on everything from the manufacture of plastic toys to the floating garbage island in the Pacific that they end up in, with 350 pages in between and an epilogue that (finally) actually discusses Herman Melville's well-known novel of obsession with another, slightly larger and more useful, denizen of the sea. If I commit to this book, I suspect it may completely talk me out of plastic toys... at least floating ones...

540-549: Chemistry-- The Disappearing Spoon, by Sam Kean

The Disappearing Spoon is not a book about chemistry exactly. There's a basic explanation of atomic structure and why elements combine; there's a bit of unpacking of the structure of the periodic table; and then Kean just riffs for 346 pages. I enjoyed learning that "the noble gases" are those that are self-sufficient, that have a 'closed' outer shell already containing exactly the right number of electrons, so that they don't react with other elements. I was surprised to learn that almost all the elements are considered metals, even those that we call minerals, like calcium, or salts, like lithium. There were many interesting and entertaining stories about idiosyncratic scientists that I didn't learn; that is to say, I can't recall them anymore. But what really made an impression on me was Kean's reference to Mark Twain's interest in chemistry.

It turns out Twain wrote a short story with the dreadful title of Sold to Satan-- well, it's more of a sketch, really, and as it turns out, the point is not to tell a Devil-and-Daniel-Webster story, but to give Twain an excuse to write about that exciting new discovery of the late 19th century, radium. Twain says Satan appeared to the narrator as  "a softly glowing, richly smoldering torch, column, statue of pallid light, faintly tinted with a spiritual green, and out from him a lunar splendor flowed such as one sees glinting from the crinkled waves of tropic seas when the moon rides high in cloudless skies." I won't be giving away much if I say this turns out to be because the Devil is made of radium, contained in polonium, and that the most interesting bit in the story is when-- right at very beginning of the 20th century-- he gives us a news report about Curie's activities in isolating this element and predicts the power-- and the problems-- of radioactivity.

Kurt Vonnegut also liked to throw a little chemistry into his fiction. In God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, the title character at one point starts drinking with a group of volunteer firemen and ..."built gradually to a crying jag, during which he claimed to be deeply touched by the idea of an inhabited planet with an atmosphere that was eager to combine violently with almost everything the inhabitants held dear. He was speaking of Earth and the element oxygen." As it turns out, that's a bit of an oversimplification of the phenomenon of fire, but it does the job-- Vonnegut's job, after all, is often to make us pay attention to the basic weirdness of life.

And chemistry is pretty weird, after all-- or rather, the phenomena it studies are pretty weird. For example, it tells us that everything on this inhabited planet including ourselves is made up of millions of tiny solar systems of atoms, spinning around and swapping their electron planets back and forth so that they can all find some kind of stability, and that somehow this all works so that I am me and you are you and we don't spontaneously and violently combine with our atmosphere and go up in flames. So, although we are not "nothing but" chemical reactions, we certainly are that as well as "meat suits" (another Vonnegut phrase) as well as transcendent souls.

So, if you love chemistry, you should probably read some other, more serious book on the subject. If you don't love chemistry, read Twain's story, which is in the public domain. And maintain your sense of wonder about all the invisible processes that surround you!