66 Scientific American, April 2020
RECOMMENDED
By Andrea Gawrylewski
© 2020 GEORGE STEINMETZThe Alchemy of Us: How Humans
and Matter Transformed One Another
by Ainissa Ramirez. MIT Press, 2020 ($27.95)Humans have reshaped the
world with inventions such as
railroads and transistors. But
these innovations have al tered
our behavior in turn. Ma terials
scientist Ramirez de tails the
battle between retired reverend Han ni bal Goodwin
and en trepreneur George Eastman of the Eastman
Ko dak Company over the patent for lightweight,
flexible photographic film. She also exposes a sinister
side of the story, explaining how Ko dak’s engineers
created film that made darker faces appear flat,
almost like inkblots, because they fine-tuned the
product’s sensitivity to lighter skin tones. And bar-
rier breakers such as Polaroid employees Caroline
Hunter and Ken Williams fought tirelessly, starting
in 1970, to pressure Kodak to divest from apartheid-
era South Africa. New technologies may lead to a
brighter future, but as Ramirez writes, “their use is
not always for the greater good.” — Sophie BushwickIn the Waves: My Quest to Solve
the Mystery of a Civil War Submarine
by Rachel Lance. Dutton, 2020 ($28)Most would refuse to climb
into a 40-foot-long metal
tube—of dubious quality—
with a 135-pound black pow-
der charge attached to it. But
the small crew of the Confed-
erate submersible craft, the HL Hunley, did exactly
that. Unfortunately for them, the sub sank in 1864
during battle, killing all onboard. The ship’s re -
mains were raised in 2000 from the bottom of the
Charleston, S.C., harbor, and researcher Lance
chronicles her subsequent investigation into what
precisely sunk the craft. She builds a model of the
boat, tests the explosive force of the charge it car-
ried, re-creates the blast effects on the craft’s hull,
and considers whether the crew’s fate was asphyx-
iation or, perhaps, death by gunfire. In the end,
the answer to the 156-year-old cold case was
uncovered far away from the scene of the sinking:
a farm pond in North Carolina. — Michael MrakAmerican Sherlock: Murder, Forensics,
and the Birth of American CSI
by Kate Winkler Dawson.
G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2020 ($27)
Edward Oscar Heinrich is
“the most famous criminalist
you’ve likely never heard of.”
Through a hybrid of biography,
true crime and science history,
journalist Dawson introduces
the riveting narrative of how largely self-taught sci-
entist Heinrich helped to pioneer and refine many
areas of forensic science over a 40-year career
spent working more than 2,000 cases. Dawson—
who was granted exclusive access to Heinrich’s vast
forensic archives—uses several of the headline-
grabbing cases he investigated as the lens to illumi-
nate the scientist’s contributions to the U.S. court
system, ranging from ballistics evidence to foren-
sic entomology. That legacy is a mixed one, though,
as Dawson point outs, with some of the disciplines
he championed, such as blood-spatter patterns,
having since been debunked. — Andrea Thompson
This stunning book offers a bird’s-eye view of a changing Earth—each image taken by Steinmetz on a paraglider or by a camera attached to a drone.
But it is not just another coffee-table book of photographs. Veteran journalist Revkin, who has devoted his career to covering a warming world,
makes the strong case throughout that it is no longer enough to passively observe how the climate is transforming Earth. We must ask ourselves
what kind of future we wish to create. Nearly every locale covered—from the islets of the Maldives to the southern tip of Antarctica—is subject to
the effects of human action or will be soon. As Revkin writes, “Our species has, in an instant of planetary time, become a potent planet-scale player.”The Human
Planet:
Earth at the Dawn
of the Anthropocene
Photography by
George Steinmetz,
text by Andrew Revkin.
Abrams Books, 2020 ($50)RED DYE traces the sinuous path of meltwater across
and through Greenland’s rapidly dwindling ice sheet.© 2020 Scientific American