May 2022, ScientificAmerican.com 87Embrace Fearlessly
the Burning World
by Barry Lopez. Random
House, 2022 ($28)This posthumously published collec-
tion of essays by nature writer Barry
Lopez reveals an exceptional life and
mind. Organized thematically, the
essays center on Lopez’s abiding love
for the environment and his extraordinarily fine-
tuned sense of place. He writes deeply nuanced
reflections on locations as disparate as Antarctica
and California’s San Fernando Valley, interlaced with
gentle meditations on art, travel, friendship, family
and searing personal trauma. While certainly a tes-
tament to his legacy and an ephemeral reprieve from
his death in 2020, this book is more than a memorial:
it offers a clear-eyed praxis of hope in what Lopez
calls this “Era of Emergencies.” — Dana DunhamThe Red Arrow: A Novel
by William Brewer. Knopf, 2022 ($27)The Red Arrow is somehow both
a harrowing depiction of depression
and a laugh-out-loud mystery about
physics, psychedelics and the pub-
lishing industry. It opens on a
Frecciarossa (“red arrow”) train in Italy, where
an unnamed American writer is searching for a
missing physicist whose memoir he is ghostwrit-
ing to get out of debt. After years of fighting sui-
cidal depression that he calls “the Mist,” an experi-
mental treatment with psilocybin mushrooms
has set his life on an entirely new course—as long
as he can find who he is looking for. At turns
delightful and demanding, William Brewer’s debut
novel is a serpentine ride that culminates in a mov-
ing encounter between art and science.
— Adam MorganScent: A Natural History of Fragrance
by Elise Vernon Pearlstine, illustrated by Lara
Call Gastinger. Yale University Press, 2022 ($28)
Reading Scent feels like going on a
meandering nature walk through the
history and science of fragrance,
guided by a wildlife biologist turned
natural perfumer. Within a single
sentence, author Elise Vernon Pearlstine writes
that incense “rises to the heavens to carry mes-
sages to the gods” and “pretty much always
involves sesquiterpenes.” Conjuring sights and
sounds from text is difficult enough, but Scent
delivers on its title in a way that Smell-O-Vision
merely wishes it could do. Despite the occasional
pitfall (describing multiple fragrant subjects as
“mysterious” and “exotic”), the book is an evoca-
tive journey that awakens one’s curiosity to an
oft-forgotten sense. — Dana Dunham
The Greatest
Polar
Expedition
of All Time:
The Arctic
Mission to the
Epicenter of
Climate Change
by Markus Rex,
translated by
Sarah Pybus.
Greystone Books,
2022 ($28.95)gle most important reference point in this
Seussian landscape—serves as the axis
around which everything else is oriented.
Want to leave the boat? Bring an armed
polar-bear guard, an emergency survival kit
and at least two backup headlamps. Search-
ing for souvenirs? Make them yourself, by
suspending oversized ice crystals in hard-
ened acrylic lifted from the machine room.
The expedition has five phases, with
crew and scientists cycling on and off the
boat, making its leader into the one reliable
human through line. Rex’s voice is endearing
and antiquated in turns. There is no bluster,
no boasting, no chest puffing here, just a
genuinely enthusiastic scientist overseeing
a season of fieldwork that has taken a life-
time to prepare. Yet in the context of writing
a climate book for a wide audience (versus
an academic paper slated for peer review),
his passion for data collection blinkers him
to how polar narratives, including his own,
uphold many of the historic power imbal-
ances that have both created the climate cri-
sis and impeded our ability to act.
Omission plagues the polar canon,
and this book is no exception. Women rarely
appear, let alone speak; Indigenous peoples
serve as set pieces as opposed to residents
with invaluable knowledge that interlopers
lack; and those whose maintenance work
makes these complex logistical endeavors
possible—in the form of cooking, cleaning
and caring for the ship and its expedition
members—lurk in the subtext, offstage.
In the century since the “Heroic Age
of Polar Exploration,” Earth’s operating sys-
tem has changed in myriad and troubling
ways, as a direct result of the imperialist
logic that drove those men poleward in
search of fame and fortune. Yet the stories
carried back from the places where these
changes are most profoundly felt hasn’t
evolved at the same stunning clip. The tales
we often celebrate showcase bearded gen-
tlemen with lofty educations (in this case,
a doctorate from the Freie Universität Berlin)
boldly going where no one has gone before
to achieve the seemingly unthinkable.
Blessedly, there are exceptions: Bath-
sheba Demuth’s Floating Coast, which recasts
the Arctic as an inhabited region of ecological
plenitude; or Joan Naviyuk Kane’s Hyperbo-
real, a lyrical investigation of loss and conti-
nuity on King Island, the author’s ancestral
home, from which her family was forcibly
removed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs; or
Mat Johnson’s satirical novel Pym, a wildly
subversive investigation of the racial ideolo-
gies that shape polar storytelling.
The most surprising moment in The
Greatest Polar Expedition of All Time comes
about two thirds of the way through, when
the pandemic threatens to end the mission
early. MOSAiC is an inherently international
collaboration, with 20 nations participating,
but as borders close and the icebreakers that
were supposed to support the ship are senthome, the Polarstern just keeps drifting. All
the meticulously laid plans—for refueling,
personnel changes, refilling of the refrigera-
tor stores—must be reimagined and fast.
The only vessels that are eventually per-
mitted to assist hail from the same country
as the ship itself, suggesting in times of crisis
(a marker with which we are certain to be -
come more familiar in the future) global col-
laboration will become increasingly difficult
to summon rather than easier. At some level
this is something we already know to be
true, having all lived through the early pan-
demic ourselves. But it is still unsettling to
hear that of the more than 80 different insti-
tutions involved in MOSAiC, the German
Federal Ministry of Education and Research
is the only one able to provide the aid neces-
sary to save this unprecedented mission.
Once the obstacles posed by the pan-
demic have been overcome, life on the
Polarstern returns to “normal” rather
quickly. Turbulence sensors are deployed,
ice cores extracted, seismic measurements
collected. Then the ice Rex and his team
have lived alongside for nearly a year melts,
and everyone goes home. Almost as if noth-
ing has changed at all.Elizabeth Rush is author of Rising: Dispatches
from the New American Shore (Milkweed,
2018), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer
Prize in General Nonfiction. She teaches
creative nonfiction at Brown University.IN BRIEF