| The Magazine of the CALIFORNIA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES |
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Reviews Amidst Gorillas In The Kingdom of Gorillas: Fragile Species in a Dangerous Land, by Bill Weber and Amy Vedder. Simon and Schuster, New York, NY, 2001, 370 pp., $27.50 hardcover. In the 1970s, Rwanda’s eastern mountain gorillas became well known to armchair adventurers worldwide. Featured in National Geographic videos and magazine spreads with Dian Fossey, the charismatic apes charmed their human relatives with their intelligence and playfulness. In spite of the gorillas’ popularity, when husband and wife research team Amy Vedder and Bill Weber arrived in Rwanda in 1978 to study the animals, the ape’s fate was far from certain. Hunters preyed on the gorillas, even though Dian Fossey tortured and tormented suspected poachers. At the same time, an insatiable hunger for land, fueled by unchecked population growth and poverty, put the gorillas’ mountain refuge at risk. In the Kingdom of Gorillas is a vivid account of Vedder and Weber’s personal quest to save the gorillas from their human neighbors. The book begins like a richly detailed field journal, offering insight into the researchers’ intimate experiences with the gorillas. Vedder, a biologist, was determined to record the animals’ feeding habits, even though another researcher warned her that the gorillas would not tolerate her presence. Undeterred, the white ape adopted characteristic gorilla behaviors—grunts, belches, and bows—that won her access to the tight-knit group. During one of Vedder’s vigils, a young male gorilla named Ziz reached out to her with his massive hand, drawing her into the “simian daisy chain.” But the interspecies connection did not end with Weber and Vedder, who were not content to live like monkeys in trees, as one Rwandan official accused them of. Convinced that the key to the gorillas’ survival lay in the hands of their human neighbors, the couple set out to win the Rwandans’ “hearts, minds and money pouches.” They launched the Mountain Gorilla Project, a conservation venture built on the twin pillars of education and ecotourism. When the program began, Rwandans knew little about the gorillas in their midst and few tourists ventured to the rugged mountain refuge. The authors persevered through the opposition of developers, turf-conscious bureaucrats, and even the dark figure of Dian Fossey herself. Ten years later, the Project was thriving, with thousands of tourists pouring millions of dollars into local communities. While the gorillas’ fate was becoming more secure, life throughout Rwanda was unraveling. The tiny country was ravaged by the AIDS crisis sweeping the continent. At the same time, tensions flared between Rwanda’s ethnic groups, eventually erupting into full-blown genocide. Within months, nearly a million Rwandan Tutsi were murdered. The authors draw a wrenching portrait of human loss. Yet, they see hope in the gorillas’ unlikely survival story: “Hope not only for the mountain gorillas, but also for the millions of Rwandans who must now find a way to reconcile a brutal past and bring lasting peace to the beautiful land they call home.” Erika Kelly Museum Matters Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads: The Culture and Evolution of Natural History Museums, by Stephen T. Asma. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK, 2001, 318 pp., $30.00 hardcover. Making Museums Matter, by Stephen E. Weil. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC, 2002, 288 pp., $18.95 paper, $40.00 hardcover. Offering two views into the ever-changing role of museums, Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads and Making Museums Matter are magnificently complementary. The former is largely about how museum collections were established in the first place, while the latter wrestles with what should be done with them today. Author of Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads, Stephen T. Asma is an outsider discovering the strange world of museums. He wonders how it all got to be this way, and then proceeds to dig up the answers. Focusing on natural history museums, he examines the origins of the collecting mania that infected 18th and 19th century Europe and North America. At the time, every gentleman had his cabinet and every small house had its stuffed something under glass, or aspired to it. Preservation was big news, and any town of consequence had its taxidermist. Transposed to the broader stage, this sentiment led to the establishment of national collections that became today’s museums. Asma intertwines his narrative with histories of the personalities involved: Peter the Great and his Living Cabinet of Curiosities; John Hunter, who boiled human corpses at home for their skeletons; and Georges Cuvier and other great 19th century taxonomists. We meet the Brothers of St. Francis, who used mummies for public plays about purgatory, and learn how the great natural history museums of the world came to be. Then, after sidelines on sea cows and insights into fleas, it’s back to modern times and the role of museums in biodiversity work and conservation. Asma is both a popularizer of cultural history and a master of the well-chosen phrase. Together, these skills help make Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads a joyful plumcake of a book—rich, succulent, and immediately pleasing. In Making Museums Matter, Stephen E. Weil deals mostly with art museums. As the longtime director of the Smithsonian’s Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, he is eminently qualified to comment. Weil’s more scholarly book also traces museum development, but from an insider’s perspective. It is concerned with what museum visitors want and how best to deliver it to them. Weil takes us from the classical “temples of education,” where the great unwashed were allowed in only to gawk, to today’s notions of the public service museum, where the visitor is god. Along the way, he illuminates the cultural importance of artifacts, and discusses tribal peoples’ lamentations that their material goods have been decontextualized and “reduced to art.” While Weil tries hard to make things fun, his dry, academic jokes may limit the popular appeal of this book. Making Museums Matter is fascinating, but it takes work to taste the full spiciness of its morsels of fact and observation—a fine curry with a large serving of academic rice.
Murder, Nature Wrote Corpse: Nature, Forensics, and the Struggle to Pinpoint Time of Death, by Jessica Snyder Sachs. Perseus Publishing, Cambridge, MA, 2001, 258 pp., $25.00 hardcover. When faced with a body at a murder scene, criminal investigators first look for clues to the victim’s time of death. The result can place a suspect at the scene of a crime or exonerate an innocent person. But for pathologists, who study changes within the body to estimate time of death, determining the precise time has remained largely elusive. For example, the three most commonly used indicators today—liver mortis, a change in the color of pooled blood; rigor mortis, or muscle stiffening; and algor mortis, a decline in body temperature—are only useful for the first 24 to 48 hours after death. But a better understanding of nature’s ways may be changing this scenario. In Corpse, Jessica Snyder Sachs provides an engaging look at how plants, chemicals, and insects found near the body can help pinpoint time of death. Written for a lay audience, Corpse begins with the historical development of the field, noting references to the use of medical knowledge in death investigations as far back as the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BC. Then Sachs takes us swiftly through time to present practices and emerging fields such as forensic entomology and forensic botany. Far from being a tedious regurgitation of mundane academic details, Corpse brings the subject of forensics to life. Sachs profiles interesting and colorful investigators as they unravel real-life mysteries. Take, for example, the case of Faith Hathaway, a young woman reported missing from Louisiana in spring 1980 (and later portrayed in the movie “Dead Man Walking” as the victim of actor Sean Penn’s character). Before Hathaway’s body was found in a local ravine, two teenagers had been abducted at gunpoint by two men in the same area. They survived the ordeal and were able to place the suspects, arrested after the abduction, near the ravine on May 29. Based on the age of the blow fly maggots collected from the body, entomologist Lamar Meek determined that the insects laid their eggs on the corpse also sometime on May 29. Since blow flies occupy a corpse almost immediately after death, the victim and the suspects could be associated with the ravine on the same date. Faced with this evidence, the suspects confessed to the killing. Likewise, when Terra Ikard was found dead in a ditch beside a sunflower field in 1991, plant ecologist Jane Bock looked to nature for clues. The killer had tried to hide the body by covering it with uprooted sunflowers. By comparing the wilted state of these flowers to flowers wilted for a known amount of time, Bock estimated that one to two weeks had passed since the sunflowers were pulled from the ground. Her testimony helped lead to the arrest and conviction of the victim’s boyfriend. With myriad other examples, Sachs provides not
only a comprehensive look at the newest developments in forensics, but
discusses the reliability of these methods. Corpse is a gripping
read that makes it clear that nature—and the skill and creativity of biologists—is
making it ever more difficult to get away with murder. Recommended Reading from the Editors’ Desks The Jepson Desert Manual: Vascular Plants of Southeastern California, by Bruce G. Baldwin, et. al. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA 2002, 640 pp., $35.00 paper. Only rarely do you find a book that is exciting by itself only to discover that it is merely the tip of an iceberg. The new Jepson Desert Manual is one such book. While superficially similar to the original Jepson Manual, which includes everything from stem size and flower color to horticultural hints for California’s vast flora, this new book covering California’s eastern and southeastern desert regions is no simple excerpt. Double-checked by teams of taxonomic authorities, this exhaustive revision and rewrite is supplemented with more than 400 new illustrations and photographs, making the book of great interest to desert aficionados and botanists alike. But behind this book lies a grander scheme known as the Jepson Flora Project, which is turning the Jepson manuals into an encyclopedia of plant knowledge virtually unmatched in the world. The project’s goal is to present a unified set of California flora data, as well as an online interchange (http://ucjeps.berkeley.edu/) that includes distribution maps compiled from reports by both amateur and professional botanists. The desert manual, along with continually updated editions of the original Jepson Manual and future regional manuals, is the beginning of great things in California botany. Jellies: Living Art, by Judith L. Connor & Nora L. Deans. Forward by Terry Tempest Williams. Monterey Bay Aquarium Foundation, Monterey Bay, CA, 2002, 96 pp., $16.95 paper. Of the sea. Open sea. Transparent. Translucent. Bell and Tentacles. Nothing Hidden. A gelatinous body of nerves. Pulsating. Throbbing. Drifting. A jelly is more verb than noun. Terry Tempest Williams’ tantalizing first words in the foreword of Jellies: Living Art captures the essence of what it must be like to be a jelly drifting in the open ocean. The Monterey Bay Aquarium first brought the beauty and wonder of living jellies, formally known as jellyfish, to the public with the opening of its Outer Bay wing. Now the Aquarium has opened a set of new living jelly displays juxtaposed with works of art, allowing visitors to explore both the science and natural beauty of these nomads of the sea. Jellies: Living Art, the companion book to this exhibit, interweaves jelly science and jelly art in a series of five essays. Striking, close-up photographs depict not only jellies’ myriad adaptations to life in the ocean, but also the work of artists who have been inspired by that world and its inhabitants. While this alone makes Jellies a stimulating addition to any ocean enthusiast’s library, the highly personal essays of authors Connor and Deans take the book one step further. By sharing the sense of wonder they have developed for these animals over two decades, the authors meld a love of natural science and art into a fascinating look at jellies—as living beauty, as well as beautiful art.
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