Review: The Beekeeper's Lament: How One Man and Half a Billion Honey Bees Help Feed America

The Beekeeper's Lament: How One Man and Half a Billion Honey Bees Help Feed America by Hannah Nordhaus

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Recent headlines about the worldwide collapse of bee populations, and the impact that has on apiarists and agricultural interests here in the United States, get a full examination in this fun and extensive book.

By "full examination," I mean "full." This book goes on and on and on.

Not without merit, mind you; John Miller, the protagonist and primary source for this book, is an interesting character, and one can't help but be enthralled with the story of how a handful of large operators are fundamentally responsible for keeping flowering crops producing.

Hanna Nordhaus' key points:

-- It is the very nature of large operations, and the profit motives that keep them operating, that are stressing bees, have essentially led to the elimination of feral bees in the United States, and drive significant annual losses that threaten bee populations.

-- There's no clear answer as to what has caused the collapse of bee colonies worldwide. It seems a combination of parasites, pesticides and year-round schedules that don't afford bees the downtime they need.

-- It's hard to make a living as a commercial apiarist. Commercial and practical pressures are plentiful; operating margins are tight.

-- There are some fascinating characters involved in the bee industry, and even more fascinating efforts afoot to preserve bees from what seems to be their perennial wont to die off en masse.

I felt this work was too long by half. It is an extraordinary piece of journalism, and had it been presented as a magazine article, I would have felt cheated. But at 291 pages, it occasionally wanders; and points which could have been made succinctly were needlessly drawn out.

That said, I'm not at all sorry for having read this, and would recommend it to anyone interested in science, nature, biographies and just good reads in general.

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Review: In the Ruins of Empire: The Japanese Surrender and the Battle for Postwar Asia

In the Ruins of Empire: The Japanese Surrender and the Battle for Postwar Asia by Ronald H. Spector

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

An exceptionally well-written overview of the three years following the end of World War II in Japanese-occupied Asia.

The major takeaways from this breezy, fascinating history:

-- The United States effectively created most of the Far East trouble it would deal with in later years by simultaneously advocating independence and free elections, and subsequently doing little to promote either. Little, that is, except send mixed messages to the Soviets, Chinese and British, so that they were equally ineffective in plotting a course forward.

-- For all their modern-day caterwauling about the evils of American imperialism (which gripes are entirely legitimate, mind you), the French and Dutch were pretty horrible when it came to attempting to reimpose their dominion in the region.

-- The Japanese basically kept most of Asia together in the wake of World War II, and were largely amenable to Western ends, even after having promised those nations independence as the war waned, and many within the former Imperial Army wanting to create a pan-Asian league that could resist the West.

-- Without question, the Far East was a terrible place to be after World War II, even in the few places with relative political stability. Famine was the rule everywhere, as were land grabs, looting and all the other spoils of war.

Ronald Spector has mastered the elusive art of being able to plumb a topic in an engaging, but humble, way. Most histories of this kind of breadth tend to either come off as arrogant or, worse, torpid; not so here. Just the right amount of fact, quote, background and detail to give an understanding of the situation without bogging the reader down in minutiae.

Highly recommended.

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Review: On the Map: A Mind-Expanding Exploration of the Way the World Looks

On the Map: A Mind-Expanding Exploration of the Way the World Looks by Simon Garfield
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I've long had "Just My Type," Simon Garfield's book on fonts, on my wish list. After reading "On The Map," I'm convinced it should be read.

Not that "On The Map" is a magnificent work. It's a pretty good, fairly entertaining, rather informative collection of essays about maps.

It has problems.

Garfield's definition of what constitues a map is a bit broad for my taste, so his essays cover a lot of ground that might have been better served expanding on those which deal with the traditional understanding of paper, geographic representations.

Also, Garfield occasionally wanders into the speculative, especially at the end of the book, and some of his conjecture -- for example, his dabble into debunking sexual stereotypes -- can border on intellectually offensive, if not absurd.

Others have taken Garfield to task as a wanting emulator of Bill Bryson, a comparison that's hard to avoid. I've only ever read one Bryson book, so I'm hardly an authority, but I found him longwinded and occasionally pretentious, two things Garfield is most certainly not.

To each his own, of course. This was entertaining enough a read, consumed easily as nightstand reading, and well worth a look if you aren't religious about maps, but simply curious.

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