Filed under: Reviews received
Another very nice capsule review in one of my favourite magazines
This original account of photosynthesis does what every popular-science work strives to do: provide a lucid-to-the-lay-reader explanation of a mundane or complex phenomenon. Yet Morton goes well beyond that laudable achievement. Folded cunningly into his disciplinary synthesis (physics, chemistry, cellular biology, environmental science) and basic explainer (what, exactly, photosynthesis is, and why apprehending “the most important process on the planet” is crucial to our understanding of today’s pressing energy and climate-change issues) is nothing less than a majestic terrestrial biography—a meticulous look at the history and future of the Earth itself. All this is in a well-paced, smartly plotted, bouncingly written package. Buoyed by a tone of optimism and uplift (“The science that enriches our wonder at the world also offers us ways of making things better”), Morton’s clear-eyed assessment makes visible a heretofore unseen world—ours—and illuminates its possibilities.
Filed under: Reviews received
A capsule review in this week’s issue, after the piece on the Joy of Sex:
Photosynthesis doesn’t sound sexy, but Morton, a science journalist and the author of the book “Mapping Mars,” has produced an account of it that fuses science with the history of science to convey its enormous, if nearly invisible, grandeur. Beginning with a painstaking explanation of how rubisco, probably the earth’s most common protein, “knits” carbon dioxide into the living tissues of vegetation, the book ranges widely. Its final section takes the reader from the eighteenth-century dissenting preacher and scientific tinkerer Joseph Priestley’s first inkling of the different gases making up the air to the vastly increased carbon emissions of today, and is particularly worthwhile. Morton shows how the content of “air” is the basis for everything we take for granted, and provides both a sense of awe and an extremely useful way to think about global energy concerns and the climate crisis.
What a delightful way to start the year…
Clive James says kind things in the TLS Books of the year round up.
Among current books about science, my favourite is Oliver Morton’s Eating the Sun (Fourth Estate), which makes a thriller out of photosynthesis. It hasn’t been as easy a read as, say, Andrew Smith’s Moondust, (Bloomsbury) but I already knew something about the Apollo programme. About photosynthesis I knew nothing, or thought I did: now I realize that I knew less than that. Figuring out how plants work isn’t rocket science – it’s a lot more complicated – but if you can do without the countdowns and the space suits, the biology laboratories are where the excitement is now.
As I think I mentioned, I’m giving a talk in Boston on Wednesday at the 4th Clean Energy conference, and so it’s gratifying to have some early interest in the book in Boston nedia. In the Globe, Anthony Doerr pairs Eating the Sun up with The Superorganism, the new ant book by Bert Holldobler and E. O. Wilson (Amazon UK|US) under the headline “Overlooked Agents of Change” and says excitingly complimentary things.
On the surface, Morton’s new book is about photosynthesis. But to say this doesn’t do “Eating the Sun” justice. Over the course of the last century, with something like quiet heroism, scientists have dissected photosynthesis, illuminating an exquisite symphony of biochemistry. Morton devotes the first third of “Eating the Sun” to charting the thrills of elucidating that symphony. The intricacies of the chemistry in this section get occasionally confusing, but hang in there.
In the latter two sections of the book, Morton starts hitting simpler, more accessible notes, and he hits them beautifully. For all of us who’ve shivered outside on a bitterly cold morning and muttered, “So much for global warming,” “Eating the Sun” helps us understand the immense complexity of what’s really going on.
This book is fundamentally about relationships. To even begin fashioning a model of Earth’s carbon cycle, for example, one has to consider the time of year, the planet’s reflectiveness, oceanic conditions, industrial emissions, and rates of chemical weathering, and a jumble of other factors. Indeed, the air we breathe is a rat’s nest of intersecting loops, where one strand might be wobbles in Earth’s axis, another the water cycle, another the nitrogen cycle, another the sulfur cycle, and so on. “Every change bumps up against another,” explains Morton; “no cause is sufficient in itself.”
…The infinitesimal chemical reactions occurring inside the leaves in your backyard are ultimately connected to the gasoline in your lawnmower and the air over Kathmandu. And “Eating the Sun” elegantly traces the multiple, increasingly skewed reverberations inside that system.
Meanwhile Jim Sullivan at the Phoenix interviewed me about what the conference keynote I’m giving would say.
“I’m by nature not that optimistic,” admits Morton, “but at the same time, I am optimistic about this. Intellectually, the case is pretty good. You have a duty to be optimistic. It’s not in my temperament, but nor it is fake. If you don’t think you can change the future, it’s like you’re not showing up.”
More on my difficulties with optimism here…
Incidentally, the Phoenix piece also quotes me completely accurately on how easy life has been with fossil fuels, because they are such dense and accessible stores of energy. At the broad historical level this is true — but seeing it on screen suggests to me that it could be read as minimising the hard and frequently deadly work of those who actually mine and have mined the coal, and who drill for oil. Not my intention at all.
Filed under: Reviews received
Wordle-cloud of Eating the Sun reviews, as of 081101
A review in Library Journal by Sara Rutter, of the University of Hawaii Library, which again does me the honour of a star:
Award-winning science journalist Morton’s (Mapping Mars) latest book is a beautiful example of what science writing can achieve and serves as a unique contribution to the public understanding of a research field underrepresented in popular science literature. Providing textbook details of the photochemical and enzymatic events that take place in the chloroplast to produce photosynthesis, Morton writes in clear and graceful prose, augmenting his well-researched facts by telling the fascinating backstory of the research scientists who have added to our understanding of a biological process that is so crucial to sustaining life on Earth. Morton brings to light the sometimes fractious and yet interdisciplinary collaborative groups that worked together across an international landscape to elucidate the mechanisms of photosynthesis. Moving from the molecular level, he explores the impact of plants on our planet, describing paleobotanical research, exobiology, and Lovelock’s Gaian view of Earth. Tying all this together, a final chapter considers the impact of our reliance on fossil fuel, derived from early photosynthesizing plants, on our planet. Strongly recommended for large public libraries and academic libraries.
Filed under: Reviews received
Another generous review, by Gilbert Taylor (who also had nice things to say about Mapping Mars’s “appealing blend of science and imagination” way back when), in the American Library Association’s Booklist
Morton’s curiosity-driven ruminations concern photosynthesis in a work imbued with wonder and worry about that biological process. Worry, because anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions outstrip the uptakecapacity of plants; wonder, that they have that ability in the first place. These dueling moods recur throughout Morton’s narrative as he recounts discoveries about photosynthesis, an intricate chemical cascade that daily begins with sunlight and ends in the longest rhythms of geological time. Unshackling the science from its chronological history, Morton opens with the applications of radioactive isotopes such as carbon 14 to investigations of photosynthesis and in due course presents pioneers of plant physiology. At all points, whether through the history books or personal encounters, Morton depicts the discrete problem that piques a scientist or lends a philosophical cast to his scientific motivations, and he seems especially taken by James Lovelock, author of the so-called Gaia theory. Morton is as insightful observing a single tree as he is explaining plant life’s interconnections with the biosphere and the totality of earth history.
Wordle-cloud of Eating the Sun reviews, as of 081001
Another US review for Eating the Sun: Kirkus (sub required). And delightfully, another star!
Meticulous but always engaging account of photosynthesis, the process that makes life possible.
Because most readers probably last encountered that word in high-school biology, science writer and Nature chief news editor Morton (Mapping Mars, 2002) faces a tough challenge in making the subject accessible, but he succeeds magnificently. The pace never flags in more than 400 pages recounting the history of life (essentially the history of photosynthesis) and of how plants convert sunlight, water and carbon dioxide into plant tissue, the source of animal flesh and food as well as oxygen and much of our landscape and weather. The author reminds us that the animal kingdom reverses photosynthesis. Animals consume oxygen, plants and each other to live, and then they die, decay and revert to inorganic matter, especially water and carbon dioxide. This cycle, stable for billions of years, is now out of whack, he notes. Humans are reversing photosynthesis on a massive scale by burning immense quantities of organic matter (coal, oil, wood), converting it back into carbon dioxide faster than plants can use it or the oceans and atmosphere can absorb it.
That unsurprising bad news comes late in the book. Until then readers will enjoy the author’s biographies of scientists and accounts of research that revealed the specifics of how plants make life happen. Photosynthesis didn’t exist when life appeared well over two billion years ago, but it came soon after; Morton tells us how life probably originated and then delivers a detailed history of plant evolution to the present day. Because he describes these events as well as his scientist subjects’ thoughts, quarrels and experiments in precise detail, this is not a book to skim, but readers willing to take time will not regret it.
Top-notch popular-science writing.
On the skimming point: please feel free to skim if you want to skim. In fact, the US edition includes a new glossary intended to help skimmers figure out what’s going on if they find that in their ecstasy of fumbling they have skimmed right past the introduction of some key concept or other. That said, obviously front-to-back readers are welcome too. Also back-to-front readers. Also people too busy to read at all; this book will give you a thrill of satisfaction through mere ownership. I promise…
US launch is now rescheduled for November 18th, due to a minor snafu. This should hold firm. I’ll try and mention any events associated with it here, and they will have a category all of their own. You can also check out the page at GoodReads, which should have a live calendar.
Filed under: Reviews received
First US review — and it’s starred, which brings great joy.
The cycle of photosynthesis is the cycle of life, says science journalist Morton (Mapping Mars). Green leaves trap sunlight and use it to absorb carbon dioxide from the air and emit life-giving oxygen in its place. Indeed, plants likely created Earth’s life-friendly oxygen- and nitrogen-rich biosphere. In the first part, Morton, chief news and features editor of the leading science journal, Nature, traces scientists’ quest to understand how photosynthesis works at the molecular level. In part two, Morton addresses evidence of how plants may have kick-started the complex life cycle on Earth. The book’s final part considers photosynthesis in relation to global warming, for, he says, the Earth’s plant-based balance of carbon dioxide and oxygen is broken: in burning vast amounts of fossil fuels, we are emitting more carbon dioxide than the plants can absorb. But Morton also explores the possibility that our understanding of photosynthesis might be harnessed to regain that balance. Readers could persevere through (or skim) the more technical discussions in the first part, for what follows is a vast, elegant synthesis of biology, physics and environmental science that can inform our discussions of urgent issues.
US Publication date is now officially 4 November — nothing like a slow news day for getting some attention…
A page in the Culture section full of kind words and interesting takes by Jeremy (pictured). I’d love it even if all there was was the pull quote:
“I enjoyed this book as much for the crazed asides as for the upsetting insights.” Excerpts:
Oliver Morton has chosen, by his own admission, to write three books in one… Each informs the others, to some extent, but with a little filleting each would also stand alone, and perhaps a lesser writer would have gone for three safer, smaller books. Morton is not one for safe and small.
He gives us the big picture, and no mistake, whether he is tunnelling into the extremely intricate workings of the molecular photo-synthetic machinery or striding over the South Downs to explain the planet’s long journey from the almost lifeless waters of the late Permian ocean (250m years ago) via the shallow seas of the Cretaceous (100m years ago), through the rise of the grasses (8m years ago) to the Battle of Lewes (271,549 days ago, as I write). At times this tendency makes for jarring disjuncts, as one swoops from electron transfers to a lyrical cycle ride to the Cambridgeshire garden of a photosynthesis pioneer. Overall, though, I enjoyed this book as much for the crazed asides as for the upsetting insights…
I didn’t know that alamo is Spanish for poplar, a favourite tree of biofuel boosters. Casually dropping the little factoid that the mesa on which Los Alamos, the facility, sits is surrounded by los alamos, Morton makes his clarion call for a vast and directed scientific effort, a Manhattan Project for the solar age, one that will explore a plurality of options in search of truly renewable energy (and the fuels to store it), and that will allow the entire global population to live like Californians… This is where the detailed understanding of the inner workings of photosynthesis gain importance, for how can we change the world, as required by book three, if we have not understood it, as book one asks us to? I do wonder, though, whether the big picture of molecular machinery might possibly put some people off…If you find yourself skimming Eating the Sun in a bookshop, and you come across one of those scientific graphs, off-putting even with their avowedly user-friendly hand-style lettering, ignore it. Indeed, ignore the whole of book one, if you prefer. That way you can avoid the fascinating detail of photosynthesis, avoid an apoplexy provoked by the realisation that a writer as talented as Morton doesn’t know the difference between a pestle and a mortar, avoid the remembrance of long-forgotten biochemistry lectures, and enjoy an informative, fascinating and thought-provoking read.
Read the whole thing here.
As others have been, Jeremy is unconvinced by the necessity of the more biochemical parts of the book, or unconvinced by the idea of leading with them, or unconvinced of my ability to pull that off. When enough smart people start making a point like that you’d best take it on board… I must say that I had originally thought of putting a note to the reader at the front of the book that would have been very much along the lines of the advice Jeremy provides, somewhat in the spirit of the note on equations that Roger Penrose provides in “The Emperor’s New Mind”, and then worried that it looked arch and preemptively apologetic and decided against it. I may reconsider for future editions. (And FWIW I don’t think that applies at all to the Penrose warning, which sums up how to deal with unwelcome equations embedded in text brilliantly)
Jeremy also sort-of takes me to task a little for not writing enough about agriculture. I can see his point, I think (and appreciate that, for someone who works at the International Plant Genetic Resources Institute, it is a pressing one). Maybe there should be more agriculture in the book. In my defence, I suppose I’d say that only rarely is photosynthesis the limiting step in agriculture. Also, there are other pretty good books about future agriculture out there (though I remember not entirely agreeing with it, I’d recommend Colin Tudge’s So shall we reap (Amazon UK | US) ). But I’m all for more better books about food in the future. Indeed I’d love to read the one Jeremy has in mind, if he’d care to write it…
