While in Mexico, I finished a few books. Not as many as I’d have liked, because for the first half of our trip we were busy snorkeling and for the second half, busy shedding pounds the hard way. But still, some reading was accomplished.
I finally finished Book #34, Sean Carroll’s Endless Forms Most Beautiful, a terrific popular book on “evolutionary developmental biology,” or “evo-devo.” Essentially, Carroll gives the non-geneticist a tour through current research on regulatory genes, genetic switches, and how these elements combine to form the actual patterns of metazoan development. While I knew a bit of this stuff going in, Carroll’s explanations were lucid and the writing a lot of fun. I recommend this book highly, and even specialists in the field will find it an interesting possibility to use in their courses.
Book #35 was a “vacation book,” Lawrence Durrell’s Reflections of a Marine Venus. To be fair, I’ve read this book a couple of times, mostly on sunny coasts, but it had been awhile. I love this book best of all Durrell’s non-fiction, and return to it whenever I wish to evoke the lazily “at home” feeling Durrell manages to communicate about rustic coastal landscapes. The beginning and end are poignant and always make me sad.
Richard Hofstadter’s early book The American Political Tradition was book #36. APT is a series of vignettes of major political figures, ranging from the “founders” collectively through John Calhoun, Wendell Phillips, Teddy Roosevelt, and culminating in FDR. The book, published in 1948, is obviously the product of a youthful progressive, with a pessimistic view of the motivations of political figures. Virtually none of the portraits in the book are laudatory, but instead attempt to situate each figure within the incentives and pressures to which Hofstadter viewed them as subject in their times. The result, even today, is a “fresh” look at key political figures in our history as well-rounded men, rather than one-dimensional icons. A terrific book.
Coming soon, notes on Banville (a couple more chapters!) and then probably a bit of time before #38. I started Jeffrey Stout’s Democracy and Tradition, which although a terrific book, is pretty dense.
