Science News - May 21, 2011

Let Them Eat Shrimp:
The Tragic Disappearance
of the Rainforests of the Sea

Kennedy Warne

For anyone wondering just what the heck “rainforests of the sea” might be, they’re the world’s largely unsung, highly imperiled, biologically fabulous coastal forests of mangroves. And it’s a telling point that the word mangroves does not appear on the cover of a book devoted to their marvels and troubles.

Rainforests of the land evoke a lot more international concern, and Warne includes in the last chapter of his vivid and pithy book a vignette of a scientist glooming about the undeserv edly low public profile of mangroves. Warne’s book sets out to remedy this, but it’s far from mere lecturing. Warne, founding editor of New Zealand Geographic, visits mangroves around the world and lets what he sees and the people he meets make their own case. The book is a travelog with attitude.

Warne explores mangroves and their creatures from tigers to (possibly)

One Hundred Names for Love:
A Stroke, a Marriage, and the
Language of Healing

Diane Ackerman

In this personal account of a stroke’s devastation on the brain, a nature writer chronicles her husband’s battle to recover his lost words.

One day, a clot lodged in the brain of Paul West, a professor, poet and novel She describes the science — part neuro science, part cognitive science and part intuition — of figuring out what was damaged in West’s brain and how to fix it. In one memorable scene, renowned

fishing monkeys. His travels take him
to places where the rising demand for
coastal areas for aquaculture, particu
larly shrimp farming, has wiped out
mangroves. One farmer tells Warne how
aquaculture income let him educate his
children, but the cost of such ventures
hangs heavy in drinkingwater wells
now ruined with saltwater and land too
salttainted to grow
food. Warne finds
hope too, in restora
tion projects and a
complex but encour
aging example of
Tanzanian villagers
struggling to bal
ance competing local
opinions in managing mangroves.

Even armchair travelers play a role in mangroves’ fate, Warne says. Ninety percent of shrimp for sale in the United States is imported, and twothirds of it comes from farms. A good start, he says, would be asking where your next shrimp comes from. — Susan Milius

Island Press, 2011, 166 p., $25.95.

neurologist Oliver Sacks, a friend of
the family, comes to visit and coaxes
West — who can barely speak — to sing
“Happy Birthday” and “Jerusalem.”
On his road to recovery, West
becomes a “king of malaprops and
a geyser of neologisms,” Ackerman
writes. His neural hiccups — saying
“skellington” instead of skeleton, and
calling a computer a “light dancing
mailbox” — reveal the idiosyncrasies
of the brain. Ackerman leaves the
impression that the brain, and particu
larly one holding such vast verbal stores,
has an astounding capacity to heal.

At times, the scientific descriptions lapse into generalizations and oversim plifications, losing the nuances and precision of brain research that scien tists are still struggling to understand. But Ackerman’s powerful narrative, compelling subjects and imaginative, lively writing more than make up for those occasions. — Laura Sanders

The Information
James Gleick

The story of informa-
tion itself takes
readers on a ride
through history, from
the first alphabet to the bits and
bytes of the modern Information Age.

Pantheon, 2011, 526 p., $29.95.

The Cloud Collector’s
Handbook

Gavin Pretor-Pinney
For weather buffs
or anyone who has
hunted cloud animals,
this clearly written guide to the skies
makes a game of spotting the many
kinds of clouds. Chronicle Books,
2011, 143 p., $14.95.

Quantify!

Göran Grimvall

A fun survey of the
use of numbers to
make sound judg-
ments, from gravity’s
effects on sports
records to statistical analysis of the
weather. Johns Hopkins Univ. Press,
2011, 218 p., $25.