For five years, from 2016-2021, we lived in an International Dark Sky Community, Sedona, Arizona, so I was drawn to the recently published book The Darkness Manifesto: On Light Pollution, Night Ecology, and the Ancient Rhythms that Sustain Life, by Johan Eklöf. Dark Sky Communities earn that designation by actively utilizing low-impact lighting fixtures in municipal buildings and infrastructure, requiring businesses to do the same, and encouraging citizen participation. At 4350 feet elevation, the night skies were spectacular, at least when there weren’t forest fires in the area.
Having lived in big cities for most of my life, seeing so many stars and the bright swath of the Milky Way was a revelation. It was easy to spot the International Space Station when it passed overhead. Fewer and fewer people are able to truly see the night sky, as light pollution has increased. Eklöf recounts the true (though probably exaggerated) story of the 1994 blackout in Los Angeles. The Griffin Observatory and local emergency services fielded a number of phone calls from worried citizens reporting a strange pale white smear across the sky. They had simply never seen the Milky Way before.
There are increasing parts of the world where it is never dark enough to truly trigger the eye’s night vision mechanism while walking outside. In Singapore, the brightest city on the planet, he writes “if you were raised in Singapore, you’ve likely never experienced night vision.”
The book tackles much more than simply the aesthetic pleasure of the night sky. The author is a bat expert, which led to his fascination with darkness. Bats get a lot of press, but in fact nearly two-thirds of invertebrate creatures and approximately one-third of vertebrates are nocturnal. The nighttime is a teeming world. He recounts sitting in the darkness watching the interactions of moths and bats. Moths working at night are as important pollinators as the bees during the day. They have an incredible sense of smell and can detect a scent molecule from miles away. They also have a very keen sense of hearing, which enables them to detect the sound of a bat swooping in to eat them. and the two creatures engage in an endless veering battle of tracking and avoidance.
Much of the natural world relies on the very night sky that humankind strives to vanquish. Take, for example, the dung beetle:
The dung beetle is one of the best at using the moon’s barely discernable patterns in the sky….To find the closest and fastest way [to roll its dung ball home], dung beetles navigate with help from the moon’s polarized light in the night sky, and even the weakest light from the sliver of a new moon can lead them in the right direction. They have such great sensitivity for nuanced differences in this light that even in environments close to big cities where weak traces of light spill out from streets and homes, the beetles can find their way. But in that case the moon must be full, for otherwise the trails in the sky are hidden, even for dung beetles. For safety’s sake, they also make use of the stars to orient themselves in open landscapes. By climbing up on their ball, turning towards space, and performing a little dance, they create for themselves a snapshot of the night sky.
May you dream tonight of dung beetles perched atop their dung balls, gazing at the stars and dancing.
Manmade light can disrupt the natural world in many ways. Moths travel by the light of the moon, but are distracted by bright lights. Illuminated parking lots can appear to be bodies of water to insects like the mayfly, leading them to deposit their eggs on barren asphalt rather than in the water they need. Mating pheromones are activated and released as darkness falls, but if darkness never fully falls, the mating might never happen. An estimated 40% of insect species are threatened with extinction, and the disruption of darkness is one of the causes.
A standard streetlight attracts insects from about twenty yards, but sometimes it’s up to fifty yards. Given that streetlights are usually closer together than that, it’s extremely difficult for insects to cross a road without being ensnared by a light source. This means that every road, even the smallest sidewalk, acts as a kind of barrier.
Birds navigate by starlight in their long migrations, and the increasing light pollution can confuse them. The most astounding example of this is when the September 11th Tribute in Light remembrance---powerful spotlights shining straight into the sky from the site of the World Trade Center, visible from ten miles away. From 2010 to 2017, scientists studied the effects on birds from this one night a year display. Enormous flocks of migrating birds veer from their paths during the display, flying in circles, cawing and singing until the lights are turned off. Only then do they continue on their southern journey.
Recall the dance of bats and moths mentioned above? Let’s look at the giant squid and sperm whales. Giant squids have the largest eyes on the planet, up to eleven inches. Light doesn’t travel well underwater, but these huge eyes allow the squid to see one thing up to 400 feet away: the cloud of glowing bioluminescent algae and microorganisms triggered by a sperm whale diving in search of a squid to eat (they can dive over a mile on a single breath). The sperm whale is emitting a mighty 230 decibel sound wave to echo-locate the squid, while the squid rushes to avoid that glowing cloud hurtling towards it.
It’s an enjoyable book, filled with nature, biology, astrophysics, history and philosophy. I recommend you spend an afternoon reading it, and then venture outside and sit quietly, observing the nighttime world to whatever extent your illumination environment will allow.
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I also post a comment each week to one of the Black Kos diaries featuring the week’s new fiction and nonfiction releases of special interest to Black and Latino/a readers, adult, teens and children. Click here to read today’s comment. My Pride Month display is also up at The Literate Lizard website, with a selection of over 50 titles discounted 20% for books over $20, and 15% for books $20 and under. You can see the adult selection HERE, and the selections for teens and kids HERE.
THIS WEEK’S NEW NOTABLE NONFICTION
- The Supermajority: How the Supreme Court Divided America, by Michael Waldman. This book
explores the tumultuous 2021–2022 Supreme Court term. He draws deeply on history to examine other times the Court veered from the popular will, provoking controversy and backlash. And he analyzes the most important new rulings and their implications for the law and for American society. Waldman asks: What can we do when the Supreme Court challenges the country? Over three days in June 2022, the conservative supermajority overturned the constitutional right to abortion, possibly opening the door to reconsider other major privacy rights, as Justice Clarence Thomas urged. The Court sharply limited the authority of the EPA, reducing the prospects for combatting climate change. It radically loosened curbs on guns amid an epidemic of mass shootings. It fully embraced legal theories such as “originalism” that will affect thousands of cases throughout the country. These major decisions—and the next wave to come—will have enormous ramifications for every American.
- Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World, by John Vaillant. In May 2016, Fort McMurray, the hub of Canada’s oil industry and America’s biggest foreign supplier, was overrun by wildfire. The multi-billion-dollar disaster melted vehicles, turned entire neighborhoods into firebombs, and drove 88,000 people from their homes in a single afternoon. Through the lens of this apocalyptic conflagration—the wildfire equivalent of Hurricane Katrina—John Vaillant warns that this was not a unique event, but a shocking preview of what we must prepare for in a hotter, more flammable world.
- Say Anarcha: A Young Woman, a Devious Surgeon, and the Harrowing Birth of Modern Women's Health, by J. C. Hallman. For more than a century, Dr. J. Marion Sims was hailed as the “father of modern gynecology.” He founded a hospital in New York City and had a profitable career treating gentry and royalty in Europe, becoming one of the world’s first celebrity surgeons. Statues were built in his honor, but he wasn’t the hero he had made himself appear to be. Sims’s greatest medical claim was the result of several years of experimental surgeries—without anesthesia—on a young enslaved woman known as Anarcha; his so-called cure for obstetric fistula forever altered the path of women’s health. One medical text after another hailed Anarcha as the embodiment of the pivotal role that Sims played in the history of surgery. Decades later, a groundswell of women objecting to Sims’s legacy celebrated Anarcha as the “mother of gynecology.” Little was known about the woman herself. The written record would have us believe Anarcha disappeared; she did not. Through tenacious research, J. C. Hallman has unearthed the first evidence of Anarcha’s life that did not come from Sims’s suspect reports. Hallman reveals that after helping to spark a patient-centered model of care that continues to improve women’s lives today, Anarcha lived on as a midwife, nurse, and “doctor woman.”
- First Family: George Washington's Heirs and the Making of America, by Cassandra A. Good.
Award-winning historian Cassandra A. Good shows how the outspoken stepgrandchildren of George Washington played an overlooked but important role in the development of American society and politics from the Revolution to the Civil War. While it's widely known in America that George and Martha Washington never had children of their own, few are aware that they raised numerous children together. In First Family, we see Washington as a father figure, as well as meet the children he helped raise and trace their complicated roles in American history. The children of Martha Washington's son by her first marriage--Eliza, Patty, Nelly and Wash Custis--were born into life in the public eye. Raised in the country's first "first family," they remained well-known as Washington's family and keepers of his legacy throughout their lives. By turns petty and powerful, glamorous and cruel, the Custises used Washington as a means to enhance their own power and status. As enslavers committed to the American empire, the Custis family embodied the failures of the American experiment that finally exploded into civil war--all the while being celebrities in a soap opera of their own making.
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Rebels at Sea: Privateering in the American Revolution, by Eric Jay Dolin. The heroic story of the founding of the U.S. Navy during the Revolution has been told many times, yet largely missing from maritime histories of America’s first war is the ragtag fleet of private vessels that truly revealed the new nation’s character—above all, its ambition and entrepreneurial ethos. Dolin corrects that significant omission, and contends that privateers, as they were called, were in fact critical to the American victory. Privateers were privately owned vessels, mostly refitted merchant ships, that were granted permission by the new government to seize British merchantmen and men of war. As Dolin stirringly demonstrates, at a time when the young Continental Navy numbered no more than about sixty vessels all told, privateers rushed to fill the gaps. Nearly 2,000 set sail over the course of the war, with tens of thousands of Americans serving on them and capturing some 1,800 British ships. Privateers came in all shapes and sizes, from twenty-five foot long whaleboats to full-rigged ships more than 100 feet long. Bristling with cannons, swivel guns, muskets, and pikes, they tormented their foes on the broad Atlantic and in bays and harbors on both sides of the ocean.
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Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West, by Calder Walton. Spies is the history of the secret war that Russia and the West have been waging for a century. Espionage, sabotage, and subversion were the Kremlin’s means to equalize the imbalance of resources between the East and West before, during, and after the Cold War. There was nothing “unprecedented” about Russian meddling in the 2016 US presidential election. It was simply business as usual, new means used for old ends. The Cold War started long before 1945. But the West fought back after World War II, mounting its own shadow war, using disinformation, vast intelligence networks, and new technologies against the Soviet Union. Spies is an inspiring, engrossing story of the best and worst of mankind: bravery and honor, treachery and betrayal. The narrative shifts across continents and decades, from the freezing streets of St. Petersburg in 1917 to the bloody beaches of Normandy; from coups in faraway lands to present-day Moscow where troll farms, synthetic bots, and weaponized cyber-attacks being launched on the woefully unprepared West. It is about the rise and fall of eastern superpowers: Russia’s past and present and the global ascendance of China.
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Sleeping with the Ancestors: How I Followed the Footprints of Slavery, by Joseph McGill, Jr. and Herb Frazier. Joseph McGill Jr., a historic preservationist and Civil War reenactor, founded the Slave Dwelling Project in 2010 based on an idea that was sparked and first developed in 1999. Since founding the project, McGill has been touring the country, spending the night in former slave dwellings—throughout the South, but also the North and the West, where people are often surprised to learn that such structures exist. Events and gatherings are arranged around these overnight stays, and it provides a unique way to understand the often otherwise obscured and distorted history of slavery. The project has inspired difficult conversations about race in communities from South Carolina to Alabama to Texas to Minnesota to New York, and all over the United States.
- The Talk, by Darrin Bell. The author was six years old when his mother told him he couldn’t have a realistic water gun. She said she feared for his safety, that police tend to think of little Black boys as older and less innocent than they really are. Through evocative illustrations and sharp humor, Bell examines how The Talk shaped intimate and public moments from childhood to adulthood. While coming of age in Los Angeles—and finding a voice through cartooning—Bell becomes painfully aware of being regarded as dangerous by white teachers, neighbors, and police officers and thus of his mortality. Drawing attention to the brutal murders of African Americans and showcasing revealing insights and cartoons along the way, he brings us up to the moment of reckoning when people took to the streets protesting the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. And now Bell must decide whether he and his own six-year-old son are ready to have The Talk.
- The Last Ride of the Pony Express: My 2,000-mile Horseback Journey into the Old West, by Will Grant. The Pony Express was a fast-horse frontier mail service that spanned the American West— the high, dry, and undeniably lonesome part of North America. While in operation during the 1860s, it carried letter mail on a blistering ten-day schedule between Missouri and San Francisco, running through a vast and mostly uninhabited wilderness. It covered a massive distance—akin to running horses between Madrid and Moscow— and to this day, the Pony Express is irrefutably the greatest display of American horsemanship to ever color the pages of a history book. This is Will Grant’s account of riding the trail himself with his two horses, Chicken Fry and Badger, from one end to the other.
- American Journey: On the Road with Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and John Burroughs, by Wes Davis. The epic road trips—and surprising friendship—of John Burroughs, nineteenth-century naturalist, and Henry Ford and Thomas Edison, inventors of the modern age.
In 1913, an unlikely friendship blossomed between Henry Ford and famed naturalist John Burroughs. When their mutual interest in Ralph Waldo Emerson led them to set out in one of Ford’s Model Ts to explore the Transcendentalist’s New England, the trip would prove to be the first of many excursions that would take Ford and Burroughs, together with an enthusiastic Thomas Edison, across America. Their road trips—increasingly ambitious in scope—transported members of the group to the 1915 Panama–Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, the Adirondacks of New York, and the Green Mountains of Vermont, finally paving the way for a grand 1918 expedition through southern Appalachia. In many ways, their timing could not have been worse. With war raging in Europe and an influenza pandemic that had already claimed thousands of lives abroad beginning to plague the United States, it was an inopportune moment for travel. Nevertheless, each of the men who embarked on the 1918 journey would subsequently point to it as the most memorable vacation of their lives.
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The Ghost Forest: Racists, Radicals, and Real Estate in the California Redwoods, by Greg King. Every year millions of tourists from around the world visit California’s famous redwoods. Yet few who strain their necks to glimpse the tops of the world’s tallest trees understand how unlikely it is that these last isolated groves of giant trees still stand at all. In this gripping historical memoir, journalist and famed redwood activist Greg King examines how investors and a growing U.S. economy drove the timber industry to cut down all but 4 percent of the original two-million-acre redwood ecosystem. King first examined redwood logging in the 1980s—as an award-winning reporter. What he found in the woods convinced him to leap the line of neutrality and become an activist dedicated to saving the very last ancient redwood groves remaining in private hands.
- Defiant Dreams: The Journey of an Afghan Girl Who Risked Everything for Education, by Sola Mahfouz and Malaina Kapoor. Sola Mahfouz was born in Afghanistan in 1996. That same year, the Taliban took over her country for the first time. At age eleven, Sola was forced to stop attending school after a group of men threatened to throw acid in her face if she continued. After that she was confined to her home, required to cook and clean and prepare for an arranged marriage. She saw the outside world only a handful of times each year. Sola began a years-long fight to change the trajectory of her life. She decided that education would be her way out. At age sixteen, without even a basic ability to add or subtract, she began secretly to teach herself math and English. She progressed rapidly, and within just two years she was already studying topics such as philosophy and physics. Faced with obstacles at every turn, Sola still managed to sneak into Pakistan to take the SAT. In 2016, she escaped to the United States, where she is now a quantum computing researcher at Tufts University.
- Starstruck: A Memoir of Astrophysics and Finding Light in the Dark, by Sarafina El-Badry Nance.
As a child, Sarafina El-Badry Nance spent nearly every evening with her father gazing up at the flickering stars and pondering what secrets the night sky held. The daughter of an American father and Egyptian mother who both pushed her toward academic excellence, Sarafina dreamed of becoming an astronomer and untangling the mysteries of the stars overhead. But it wasn’t long before she was told, both explicitly and implicitly, that girls just weren’t cut out for math and science. In Starstruck, Sarafina invites us to consider the cosmos through fascinating science lessons to open each chapter. But she also traces more earthbound obstacles—of misogyny and racism, abuse and intergenerational trauma, anxiety and self-doubt, cancer diagnoses and recovery—she faced along the way. As her career and passion for space brought her from UT Austin to UC Berkeley, and even to a Mars astronaut simulation in Hawai’i, Sarafina learned how to survive—and ultimately thrive—in a space that was seldom welcoming to women, and especially not to women of color.
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Love Across Borders: Passports, Papers, and Romance in a Divided World, by Anna Lekas Miller. With deep empathy, rigorous reporting, and the irresistible perspective of a true romantic, journalist Anna Lekas Miller tells the stories of couples around the world who must confront Kafkaesque immigration systems to be together—as she did to be with her partner. Written with suspenseful storytelling worthy of the greatest love stories, Love Across Borders takes readers across contentious frontiers around the world, from Turkey to Iraq, Syria to Greece, Mexico to the United States, to reveal the widespread prejudicial laws intent on dividing people. Lekas Miller tells her own story of meeting and falling deeply in love with Salem Rizk, in Istanbul, where they were both reporting on the Syrian War. But when Turkey started cracking down on refugees, Salem, who is Syrian, wasn’t allowed to stay in the country, nor could he safely return to Syria. He was a man without a country.
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Burn It Down: Power, Complicity, and a Call for Change in Hollywood, by Maureen Ryan. It is never just One Bad Man. Abuse and exploitation of workers is baked into the very foundations of the entertainment industry. To break the cycle and make change that sticks, it’s important to stop looking at headline-making stories as individual events. Instead, one must look closely at the bigger picture, to see how abusers are created, fed, rewarded, allowed to persist, and, with the right tools, how they can be excised. In Burn It Down, veteran reporter Maureen Ryan does just that. She draws on decades of experience to connect the dots and illuminate the deeper forces sustaining Hollywood’s corrosive culture. Fresh reporting sheds light on problematic situations at companies like Lucasfilm and shows like Lost, Saturday Night Live, The Goldbergs, Sleepy Hollow, Curb Your Enthusiasm and more. Interviews with actors and famous creatives like Evan Rachel Wood, Harold Perrineau, Damon Lindelof, and Orlando Jones abound. Ryan dismantles, one by one, the myths that the entertainment industry promotes about itself, which have allowed abusers to thrive and the industry to avoid accountability—myths about Hollywood as a meritocracy, what it takes to be creative, the value of human dignity, and more.
- The Elissas: Three Girls, One Fate, and the Deadly Secrets of Suburbia, by Samantha Leach. Bustle editor Samantha Leach and her childhood best friend, Elissa, met as infants in the suburbs of Providence, Rhode Island, where they attended nursery, elementary school, and temple together. As seventh graders, they would steal drinks from bar mitzvahs and have boys over in Samantha’s basement—innocent, early acts of rebellion. But after one of their shared acts, Samantha was given a disciplinary warning by their private school while Elissa was dismissed altogether, and later sent away. Samantha did not know then, but Elissa had just become one of the fifty-thousand-plus kids per year who enter the Troubled Teen Industry: a network of unregulated programs meant to reform wealthy, wayward youth. Less than a year after graduation from Ponca Pines Academy, Elissa died at eighteen years old. In Samantha’s grief, she fixated on Elissa’s last years at the therapeutic boarding school, eager to understand why their paths diverged. As she spoke to mutual friends and scoured social media pages, Samantha learned of Alyssa and Alissa, Elissa’s closest friends at the school who shared both her name and penchant for partying, where drugs and alcohol became their norm. The matching Save Our Souls tattoo all three girls also had further fueled Samantha’s fixation, as she watched their lives play out online. Four years after Elissa’s death, Alyssa died, then Alissa at twenty-six. In The Elissas, Samantha endeavors to understand why they ultimately met a shared, tragic fate that she was spared, in turn, offering a chilling account of the secret lives of young suburban women.
- The Overlooked Americans: The Resilience of Our Rural Towns and What It Means for Our Country, by Elizabeth Currid-Halkett. We are frequently told rural America is in crisis. According to many journalists, academics, and politicians, our small towns have been hollowed out by lost jobs, and residents have turned to opioids and right-wing extremism to cope with their pain and resentment. In fact, many rural towns are thriving. Commentators have fixated on the steep decline of one region—Appalachia—and overlooked the millions of rural Americans who are succeeding in the heartland. In The Overlooked Americans, public policy expert Elizabeth Currid-Halkett reveals that rural America has not been left behind the rest of the nation but instead is surprisingly successful. Drawing on deep research, including data and in-depth interviews, she traces how small towns are doing as well as, or better than, cities by many measures, including homeownership, income, and employment. She also shows how rural and urban Americans share core values, from opposing racism and upholding environmentalism to believing in democracy. Looking everywhere from Missouri to Minnesota to her hometown of Danville, Pennsylvania, Currid-Halkett ultimately reveals that the nation is less fractured by geography than many believe.
- Nature's Messenger: Mark Catesby and His Adventures in a New World, by Patrick Dean.
A dynamic and fresh exploration of the naturalist Mark Catesby—who predated John James Audubon by nearly a century— and his influence on how we understand American wildlife. In 1722, Mark Catesby stepped ashore in Charles Town in the Carolina colony. Over the next four years, this young naturalist made history as he explored deep into America’s natural wonders, collecting and drawing plants and animals which had never been seen back in the Old World. Nine years later Catesby produced his magnificent and groundbreaking book, The Natural History of Carolina, the first-ever illustrated account of American flora and fauna. In Nature’s Messenger, acclaimed writer Patrick Dean follows Catesby from his youth as a landed gentleman in rural England to his early work as a naturalist and his adventurous travels. A pioneer in many ways, Catesby’s careful attention to the knowledge of non-Europeans in America—the enslaved Africans and Native Americans who had their own sources of food and medicine from nature—set him apart from others of his time.
- Here Begins the Dark Sea: Venice, a Medieval Monk, and the Creation of the Most Accurate Map of the World, by Meredith Francesca Small. In 1459 a Venetian monk named Fra Mauro completed an astonishing map of the world. Seven feet in diameter, Fra Mauro’s mappamundi is the oldest and most complete Medieval map to survive into modernity. And in its time, this groundbreaking mappamundi provided the most detailed description of the known world, incorporating accurate observation, and geographic reality, urging viewers to see water and land as they really existed. Fra Mauro's map was the first in history to show that a ship could circumnavigate Africa, and that the Indian “Sea” was in fact an ocean, enabling international trade to expand across the globe. Acclaimed anthropologist Meredith F. Small reveals how Fra Mauro’s mappamundi made cartography into a science rather than a practice based on religion and ancient myths.
- Mozart in Motion: His Work and His World in Pieces, by Patrick Mackie. The poet Mackie follows Mozart from his youth in Salzburg to his early death; from his close and rivalrous relationship with his father to his romantic attachments; from his hugely successful operas to intimate compositions on the keyboard, Patrick Mackie leads the reader through the major and lesser-known moments of the composer’s life and brings alive the teeming, swiveling modernity of eighteenth-century Europe. In this era of rococo painting, surrealist aesthetics, and political turbulence, Mozart reckoned with a searing talent that threatened to overwhelm him, all the while pushing himself to extraordinary feats of musicianship. In Mozart in Motion, we are returned to the volatility of the eighteenth century and hear Mozart’s music in all its audacious vividness, gaining fresh perspectives on why his works still move us so intensely today, as we continue to search for a modernity he imagined into being.
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