The Song of the Dodo - David Quammen

"The case of the Dodo was only one of hundreds."

Truly, David Quammen's book is not really that much about the dodo. Nor is it strictly a lament for our now muted world of absent bird-song. Quammen has achieved much more than a simple elegy for extinct species; his is not just mournfully warning us about the hazardous world we have created for our disappearing neighbors. Rather, Quammen has endeavored to explore a host of complex scientific theory, make his understandings communicable to the reader, and interrogate the extent to which our best scientific efforts mesh with the world around us. Weaving his travels and own scientific explorations together, Quammen brings the full-force of a scientific argument to the world, while simultaneously giving concrete example to the sometimes erudite work of the research community. As the work develops and deepens in nuance and explanatory power we better realize why Quammen's is so dedicated to his pursuit. This is a tale that grows in the telling.

The Song of the Dodo takes the transformation of our world and concomitant effects on biodiversity as an alarming, and complex problem desperately in need of explanation. To better illuminate the disappearance of (mostly island) species the world over, David Quammen travels the extent of the globe to speak with researchers and locals. Throughout, his motivating question examines why certain species become extinct. While it would be a noteworthy addition to the scientific literature if he could simply provide a lucid answer to such a difficult question, Quammen has achieved something much more profound: along the way we also learn why we ought to care about such disappearances. Part natural history, part travelogue, part historical scientific review, The Song of the Dodo is a triumph for taking the question of extinction and ponderously allowing a plethora of perspectives to interweave. The result is an emergent understanding, transcendent of aggregate evidence. It is as though Quammen has concretized his subject into a physical entity that we can circle and investigate from a host of angles and insights. What appears to begin as another lament for the destruction of the world, a two-dimensional abstraction of a global problem, gains force and momentum throughout the study. There is much to mull and ponder in the work, not least of all the transformation of Quammen's, and our own, thinking about how our own place in the world, more and more, comes at the exclusion of other species. It is not simply that the song of the dodo has been forever cast beyond the ken of human knowledge; rather, it is the silent cacophony of voices that have already joined it, and the untold numbers that will be added to the chorus in years to come.

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions - Thomas Kuhn

Vast amounts of critique, plaudits, queries and aspersions have been leveled at Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions in the 51 years since it was first published. While I am sure there is little novel (or, frankly, of interest) that I could add to the discussion, I wanted to highlight one aspect of the work which seems generally overlooked. Though SSR is the intricately tied together and carefully written this aspect is surely addressed in reference to many of its other salient points, what struck me was the notion of incommensurability and perception.

When Kuhn writes (paraphrasing) that each scientific revolution transformed the scientific imagination in ways ultimately resembling a transformation of the world, he is speaking volumes indeed. Seeing something new, for the first time, is, for Kuhn, a discovery not only of what something is, but, moreover, that something is. Our conception of science and the universe will always impinge upon our sense of what is possible. Thus, it is not to say that Aristotle was a primitive Newtonian, or that Einstein could have imagined quantum theory - each time period is dealing with a context so distinct, that they can be meaningfully said to inhabit different realities. The implications of this, and the role that perception and theory play upon both our science and our place in reality, are far-reaching.

As such, science can be said to evolve, just like nature. Issues of emergence, fitness, and phase change are just as real in science-as-subject, as they are in science-as-method. What this evolution says about the substance of science - about the phenomena that science can possibly know - is surely a pressing concept for  the field of science studies. All around us science (and scientific endeavor) expands, seemingly without limit. Yet, any case must choose what to prize and what to marginalize; all manner of looking must be exclusionary. The development of our scientific understanding has yielded so much; we must remember to not lose sight of that which it would deem insignificant, or, worse, non-existent.

Mother Earth - Sam D. Gill

The ubiquity of the Mother Earth story in Native American traditions rest, in Sam Gill's estimation, upon a mistaken legacy of simplified scholarship and dismissive, and one might argue racist, history. Gill's historical scholarship looks at the scant evidence upon which this myth was originally perpetuated, and, then, how it did become adopted by latter-day Native American's in defense of their lands and tribal rights.

Gill has uncovered a historical narrative worthy of examination, and his thorough scholarship strongly contrasts to the small evidence upon which the traditional Mother Earth narrative took shape. Perhaps the most interesting point his scholarship addresses is concern over what is lost when traditional voices are abstracted to fit a predetermined mold: by assuming before-the-fact that Native American tribes have similar Mother Earth traditions, we risk overlooking the cultural nuance and uniqueness of each tribe's stories and myths.

While the work raises many interesting questions, Gill addresses too few of them. His depth of historical research succeeds at the hands of what might be a more creative scholarship. Seemingly much  of the conclusions highlighted could be better addressed in an essay or introductory chapter. Unexamined are questions surrounding the power of narrative and the ability to take ownership of discourse. Why is that a story imposed by a powerful colonial system, became adopted by the very people oppressed to defend themselves from further divestment? What does this tell us about the politics of story and narrative? It is possible that to answer such is not the purview of this work; but the questions sit as inescapable. When Gill compares the differences between tribal-belief structures to the gaps between Catholic and Protestant Christians, or, furthermore, between Jews, Christians and Muslims, he seemingly undermines his own argument. Symmetrical interrogation suggests a Native American anthropologist traveling to Europe and the Middle East and wondering at how all of these people have come to believe in single, indivisible ancient father who created heaven and Earth; and man in his image. The level of analysis and abstraction is crucial when looking for similarities and differences in such an arena. How we look greatly influences what we see. Yes the particulars of each sect differ, but, depending on the level of abstraction, they can seem similar indeed.

While Gill's work puts forward interesting insights and broaches numerous interesting questions, the work, finally, waivers between being too deep and too broad. It is a successful provocation of novel lines of thought in need of further pursuit.

Kennedy - Theodore Sorenson

The days of the Cuban Missile Crisis would test the organization, the powers, the wherewithal and the abilities of the Kennedy White House. So much in those days of greatest tension was uncertain, and so many pieces were, by needs, juggled to ensure that such a defining moment would become, in essence, landmark for what did not, what could not be allowed to happen. Amidst the storm of danger and uncertainty was President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. With less than two years - and, one could argue, more than a few missteps - under his belt in the Oval Office, President Kennedy had to be ready, had to be willing to look out to the precipice and bring his country back from the ledge. To hear Ted Sorenson tell it, this was not a question of politics or ethos, patriotism or toughness, President Kennedy was uniquely able, in such overwhelming circumstance, because of a very simple, though nonetheless rare, quality: his humanity. John Kennedy was many things to many people: a symbol of hope and a new generation, a war hero, a political upstart and accidental superstar. For Sorenson, a man who would work with the Senator-cum-candidate-cum-President, John Kennedy's greatest strength and most virtuous depths were as man suited to the time and task; a man of great care and compassion, patience and thoughtfulness. He was, in one estimation, a bigger man than could have been supposed. It was this that set John Kennedy apart.

Sorenson's laudatory biography traces the political growth of Kennedy from 1954 to his assassination. Largely a character study, we are given insight into how Kennedy thought-about and approached such numerous issues as Civil Rights, peace summits, arms control and trade policy. Because it was written so soon after the President's death in Dallas (published in 1965), it is little wonder that Sorenson's work speaks in unparalleled terms of the man. That he was a great man is not in question, yet Sorenson perhaps oversells the young President's wisdom and adequacy to each task of his mammoth office. When missteps occur it is rarely on account of the President's approach or judgement, and all victories are won by his sage abilities and good humanity. Virtual deification can only help us understand the man in relation to his times to a certain extent, and runs the risk of leaving an audience feeling disempowered in the light of a complex and uncertain world: not a particularly democratic ideal. Though Kennedy's calls to service energized a nation, Sorenson biography may leave us all too willing to look for our next savior. He is, through and through, a Kennedy man.

Despite this Sorenson's work has achieves an insightful look into the most inner of circles of power. That we have a record of how President Kennedy governed, less from a perspective of politics and more as a study in character, is a gift. Should future generations ever wonder what it was about the brief public career of John Kennedy that made him such an important figure, they will need to look no further then Sorenson's work.

Africa as a Living Laboratory - Helen Tilley

Helen Tilley’s work examines the role that colonial science played in the expansion of empire in British Africa. Rather than succumb to the traditional narrative that scientists and colonial administrators blindly employed pre-conceived epistemologies to African environmental issues of the day, she reveals an intellectual and administrative history whereby African indigenous knowledge played a formative role in how western scientific concepts evolved and were translated back to the seats of Empire. Being able to govern an empire, with the attendant necessity of integrating varying disciplines and realms of knowledge, meant that these emergent scientific understandings also had to be integrated into a broader framework that scientists at the time were beginning to refer to as ecology. Tilley’s work gives voice to a heretofore overlooked concern of colonial science that still speaks strongly to our contemporary concerns: how do we apply practical and conceptual developments within the sciences to address complex and heterogeneous environments? Not only does this work address the role of science in the development of Africa, it asks us to consider the role of colonial Africa in the development of modern western science. Surely such an inversion is potentially grounds for fruitful discussion concerning ways of knowing, localized and universal knowledge, and how the sciences speak, not only to one another, but to the world at large.

See full review at:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0169534712002686

Prince of Networks - Graham Harman

Metaphysics deals with two fundamental problems (and, subsequently, how the two interact with one another): substance and relation. Based upon his contributions to metaphysics, specifically his novel insight into these two spheres, Bruno Latour ought to be cast among one of the preeminent philosophers of the twentieth century (and one would hazard the twenty-first); so says Graham Harman. By relocating reality to the particularities of objects' relationships, without retreating to some outside, autonomous force (as Harman accuses Whitehead), Latour has given birth to the first secular occasionalist philosophy and redefined what an actor is and how we ought to think of them. No mean feat.

The first half of Harman's work is a keen review of Latour's formative works and he ably reviews not only the nuance and insight, but more crucially, the implications of Latour's philosophies. Casting a laudatory eye upon Latour's notions of absolute concreteness and the actor as composite of its relations, Harman helps to illuminate how every actor is also a medium of relations. As a reviewer he helps to tease out such complications of Latour's work that unquestionably assist in aiding with our understanding of it.

The second half of the work introduces Harman's own positions, building towards what he terms an "Object-Oriented Philosophy." In preparation for this he places Latour in a position of philosophical success - to better uncover the implications, and thus critique Latour's claimed shortcomings as a metaphysicist. While Harman claims that Latour's work provides a foundational understanding his own efforts, the philosophy Harman develops seems not only to depart from Latour's at crucial junctures, but to run contrary to the whole enterprise. Though he identifies numerous problems with Latour's positions, which he attempts to rectify, central to his critique is Latour's inability to account for an object's future, and his failure to allow for a real identity outside of the relationships which articulate it. To correct this shortcoming Harman re-introduces a four-fold model whereby substance and occasion rule (though he has attempted to update the vocabulary). Though he goes to great lengths to show how his positions are similar to Latour's he cannot overcome the contradictions between the two - contradictions so central that one is left wondering how they can be said to agree. While yes, it does seem to ring true that objects exceed their constituent relations, this does not, as Harman argues, necessarily imply a pre-existence of substance to such relationships (this is one possible explanation). Though he has identified issues in Latour's philosophy in need of further clarification (which are partially given space in Reassembling the Social ) Harman's own responses are greatly lacking. While we may experience different manifestations of the same thing, we need some ground with which to identify it as the same over time. That identity is more settled in our eyes requires an explanation; it is not simply sufficient to say that it must be more settled. How anything comes to be emergent, to seemingly transcend its constituent parts, is where our interrogation ought to lie (if we are to critique Latour). This crucial realm Harman sidesteps entirely, thus dooming his response.

Empire of the Summer Moon - S.C. Gwynne

On the great high plains of western Texas, and extending as far west and north as Utah, out into New Mexico, across and up to Oklahoma, was perhaps the greatest inland indigenous empire the Americas have ever seen. From the introduction to the new world of the horse by the Spanish, until the second-half of the 19th century, the Comanche ruled as unquestioned masters of what was thought to be the Great American Desert. Taking buffalo and making war, covering vast distances and raiding remote homesteads, only to return to the immense fastness of the Llano Estacado escarpment, the Comanche held off the Spanish, punished the French and stopped Manifest Destiny cold.

But, seemingly, the end of their empire was written in the stars. Unable, or unwilling, to pursue military victories to the extirpation of their foes, the Comanche were satisfied with minor, albeit bloody and destructive, raids to steal horses and captives - fighting for a spot of land occupied by a village, homestead or fort was, to a nomadic people, entirely inconceivable. Whether a nomadic horse-people could have ever survived the onslaught of western settlement, we will never know, and the author does not provide any simple answers (as none are available) for why the Comanche were extirpated. Yet it came to pass nonetheless that the scourge of the plains diminished and their way of life disappeared; subsumed by a rising United States of America. By the beginning of the twentieth century the free-ranging Comanche would be a memory only, as the tribe became confined to reservations.

S.C. Gwynne's scholarship brings together a very complete story of this people situated within their time and place. How the Comanche impacted (and nearly halted) the expansion of the American empire, is a lens through which to understand the transformation of the country and the land. Gwynne interrogates the People's demise with an equitable and fair eye: while we can lament the destruction of a culture, the reader is left wondering how to reconcile our own vision of Indian peoples with the destructiveness of the Comanche. Though it seems that Gwynne may give short-shrift to some of the more thoughtful nuances to Comanche culture, he has, in a sense, cast them as they impacted the outside world. For better or worse that seems to be any people's doom. So we are left to wonder what has been lost, and, in our effort to create a more "civilized" world, are we all truly better for it?