Naming Nature : The Clash Between Instinct and Science by Carol Kaesuk Yoon, a book review

Naming Nature caught my attention primarily because I have just recently started working on learning some of the scientific names for various creatures around the neighborhood, and I was curious about the "clash" mentioned in the title.

The book turned out to be a moderately interesting discussion of the history of scientific naming and categorization coupled with the argument that, at some point (pretty much with the combination of cladistics and computers), most people decided that "nature" was something best left to scientists and let themselves be distanced from experiencing themselves.

Yoon is earnest, almost painfully so. There were plenty of new things to learn from the book, but little sense of excitement or wonder; I am glad I read it because I personally wanted to know more about categorization, and I definitely wanted to know more about cladistics (not that it turns out to be anything I'll likely use myself; Yoon is right; that particular method of categorization is well outside the amateur's range), but I'm disinclined to recommend it to other people for casual reading.

I don't entirely buy her premise, either; I'd say that city life--which she does mention--and increasing busyness have more to do with the disconnect than whether or not science is currently recognizing fish.

One thing that really did bother me was the way endnotes were handled: There were endnotes, but in-text, there was no indication that they were there. That is, in the back, the first few words of whatever sentence would be listed, and then the note would follow--but in the chapter itself, absolutely nothing indicated that there might be a relevant comment in back. Not good.

All of which winds up with me giving it a lukewarm recommendation: Naming Nature is not a book I hated, but it's a book I might not have finished if I had had other books left in the library bag at the time.

The Age of Wonder: The Romantic Generation and the Discovery of the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes, a Book Review

I picked The Age of Wonder off of the library's new book shelf, thinking it looked interesting and I almost cite put it back down after a few pages.  I'm glad I didn't.


The book starts out slowly, informative but slow going. Then, about a third of the way through, as an American, Dr. John Jeffries, and a Frenchman, Jean-Pierre Blanchard, set out to be the first to cross the English Channel in a balloon, quarreling all the while, the book took off.  The people described stopped being "significant historical figures" and became people, and I started to care what they thought and how they acted.

As the somewhat clunky subtitle The Romantic Generation and the Discovery of the Beauty and Terror of Science indicates, Richard Harris is looking again at the development of science in the Romantic era, arguing that instead of being opposed to the arts it developed alongside them. Coleridge wrote scientific essays.  Humphry Davy wrote poetry which Coleridge read and criticized. The two were friends, and were far from the only pair to cross the "divide" between science and poetry. In fact, as Harris illustrates with numerous excerpts from poems and poets, there was no such divide. The poets saw science as wonderful, as poetic; the scientist wrote poems.

The Age of Wonder covers a wide spread of personalities and times, looking at geographic and theoretical exploration both. It is heavy reading at times, but overall, fascinating and well worth the time. It also pairs well with Empires of Light by Jill Jones and Electric Universe: The Shocking True Story of Electricity by David Bodanis, covering overlapping but not identical territory.

As I have fussed about illustrations in prior books, I will add that Age of Wonder has gorgeous full-color plates. They are not, strictly speaking, essential to the text, but I did enjoy getting a look at the people discussed.