al-mofhariz

Paul Greenberg recently reviewed D. Graham Burnett's The Sounding of the Whale: Science and Cetaceans in the Twentieth Century in the New York Times . Greenberg traces the arc, as told by Burnett, of the cetacean scientist from standing knee-deep in whale innards at the turn of the century to being newly enlightened by whale-ish complexity in the interwar years to fighting alongside other frustrated technocrats at the dawn of an age of international conservation to expanding the human and Cete mind in groovy ways amidst a backdrop of Cold War science. He comes away fascinated by the experience, but also wonders if the reading public wouldn't benefit from something less that 793 pages, with footnotes for the footnotes (almost) ---or actually, he wonders if the public wouldn't benefit from more: a shortened version to accompany the encyclopedic one. Read the review. You'll encounter the characters who most capture Greenberg's imagination: A. Remington Kellogg (the P...

A couple weeks ago, I taught Martha Sandweiss's fascinating Passing Strange for my undergraduate methods seminar. The book exposes and explores the double life of Clarence King, the famed 19th century geologist of the American West. Historians have known for some time that after his western adventures King assumed a new identity as James Todd, a porter, and married a black women in New York named Ada Copeland. Sandweiss claims the honor of being the first to discover that King passed as black while married to Copeland (not a small accomplishment for a fair-haired, blue-eyed man). She also takes this relationship seriously and reconstructs not only King's life in light of it, but also the life of Ada Copeland/Todd. The book amazed my students---some compared it favorably to a novel. I enjoy the story but appreciate Sandweiss' careful historical reasoning even more. To make up for a near total absence of archival material relating to Copeland, Sandweiss assumes in her third...