John Janovy

51. Vermilion Sea : A Naturalist's Journey in Baja California by John Janovy, Jr. (1992, 229 pages, read Sep 15 - Oct 27)

I love the idea of getting lost in a naturists book, even if it doesn't always work out the way I intended. I found this one promising.

There are good and bad things up front. The main good is Baja California which is a wonderfully complex and unique world of nature, cut off and yet not from the rest of the continent.

The bad left me with a little trouble getting into this. I think there were two main reasons. First of all, instead of a naturalist going off on his own, Janovy is a biology professor specializing in parasites who joins a student field trip, run by another professor, to Baja California to look at things that are outside his expertise. Second is that Janovy clearly wants to make bigger points - but I felt he begins to do this too soon in the book. I haven't bought in yet, and he is making large philosophical points about life from what he sees in Baja. The problem is that Janovy isn't the kind of writer who can pull all this off so easily.

But sometimes a reader needs patience. After coming to terms with what Janovy was actually doing, I was able to climb aboard and ride along his observations and sense of wonder about snails, whales, a museum in the middle of nowhere, art, biology, life in general and our separation from the natural world, and maybe even a little bit about scientific perspective.

Posted on my 2013 LT thread here: http://www.librarything.com/topic/160515#4378290… (mehr)

This was an odd book. I couldn't really get into it at first, couldn't find the thread of the book as it were.

And then it all came together in the last chapters, and I understood. I've suffered from the Ogallala Blues: that yearning to be outdoors and gone when you're chained to a desk, tidying up the paperwork, writing your report, earning your daily crust in some office building somewhere -- an office building with no windows, or if there are windows, they look out over the industrial section of town.

Other than that, I can't find the words to describe how mystic this book is, and yet how intimately connected to each of us, and to the planet. You'll just have to read it yourself to find out.… (mehr)

One of my favorite popular science books is Parasite Rex by Carl Zimmer. It changed the way I think of large life forms including humans. Instead of being just a tiger or just a human, we're a collection of many life forms both bacterial and parasitical. As more and more work is done on the human genome, the findings include more and more bacterial and parasitical DNA strings. The numbers I've seen are that the human body has 100 trillion cells. Only 10 trillion of those are human. Uhhhh.......Yikes?

Janovy is a biology professor and naturalist in Nebraska. He advises students working on masters or PhDs in biology in the middle of the Bible Belt. One of the areas he advises in is parasitology. One of the first discussions is what to study. He gently reminds students that want to study cute little furry animals that parasitology will require dissecting a lot of specimens. They might feel bad and their friends might object or worse. Many then concentrate on damselflies, beetles, frogs, and tiny crustaceans.

Dunwoody Pond is not just a book about parasitology though. The author picks some of his students and follows their path through their young scientific lives. He muses on this kind of life and the rest of the world's thoughts on someone that would pick this kind of education. He ponders science careers and curiosity in a sometimes seeming incurious milieu where football reigns supreme. He riffs a bit on politics and religion but not much. Mostly, it is a book about place and lifestyle in a discipline that most of us are unaware of. It's also about teaching and guiding with a light touch. Nudge the students in a direction but let them frame the questions and specifics of their research that they will spend countless hours on. I found this a calm, peaceful, reflective book with many interesting digressions. Something I was not expecting in a parasite book.

If you want to crank up the itch factor even a bit higher, another good book is Human Wildlife: The Life that Lives on Us. Sorry to tell you this but you are a veritable zoo. Lotsa interesting beasties to get acquainted with.… (mehr)