A fascinating vision of the world as a kaleidoscope of patterns on the smallest and largest scales.
The intricate dynamics of everything from chemical interactions to elementary schools have deep underlying unities, according to Rasmussen’s searching primer on systems theory.
The author, founder of the Maui Institute and author of Men Are Easy (2007), lays out basic concepts of systems theory and complexity theory from the last half-century and integrates them into a grand framework based on Lenard Troncale’s systems processes theory, uniting physical, biological, and cultural aspects of the world. Rasmussen covers ideas including self-organization, the process by which simple individual actions yield complex, emergent group behaviors (as when individual birds that instinctively follow a few rules on how to position themselves beside each other become exquisitely coordinated flocks); the structure of networks; chaotic systems like weather and financial markets, in which tiny changes in inputs can generate huge, unpredictable storms or sell-offs; nested fractal patterns visible in everything from lightning strikes to broccoli to bitcoin values; and the breakthrough process of “systems ontogenesis,” in which low-level complexity makes a quantum leap to higher-level complexity (as when an assortment of organic molecules assembles itself into a living cell, or farming villages organize themselves into a state). In later chapters, the author applies these notions to higher-order phenomena like consciousness—slime molds, she notes, can do impressive cognitive feats like navigating mazes. Rasmussen’s treatise unfolds in concise, well-organized chapters that contain a wealth of instructive photos and charts. She conveys sometimes abstruse scientific concepts in prose that’s admirably lucid, straightforward, and intuitively appealing. (“Self-organizing criticality is the point of catastrophic change to the system…The sandpile after an avalanche has flattened, and its parameters have changed. A pandemic spreads until enough people either die or are immune, and the pandemic ends. A spark leads to a forest fire, leaving ash and debris.”) The result is a fine introduction for lay readers to systems theory that reveals its fertile insights in many ingenious guises.
A fascinating vision of the world as a kaleidoscope of patterns on the smallest and largest scales.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2024
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 354
Publisher: The Maui Institute
Review Posted Online: June 6, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.
A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.
In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536131
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
Are rivers alive? Macfarlane delivers a lucid, memorable argument in the affirmative.
The accomplished British nature writer turns to issues of environmental ethics in his latest exploration of the world.
In 1971, a law instructor asked a musing-out-loud question: Do trees have legal standing? His answer was widely mocked at the time, but it has gained in force: As Macfarlane chronicles here, Indigenous groups around the world are pressing “an idea that changes the world—the idea that a river is alive.” In the first major section of the book, Macfarlane travels to the Ecuadorian rainforest, where a river flows straight through a belt of gold and other mineral deposits that are, of course, much desired; his company on a long slog through the woods is a brilliant mycologist whose research projects have led not just to the discovery of a mushroom species that “would have first flourished on the supercontinent [of Gondwana] that formed over half a billion years ago,” but also to her proposing that fungi be considered a kingdom on a footing with flora and fauna. Other formidable activists figure in his next travels, to the great rivers of northern India, where, against the odds, some courts have lately been given to “shift Indian law away from anthropocentrism and towards something like ecological jurisprudence, underpinned by social justice.” The best part of the book, for those who enjoy outdoor thrills and spills, is Macfarlane’s third campaign, this one following a river in eastern Canada that, as has already happened to so many waterways there, is threatened to be impounded for hydroelectric power and other extractive uses. In delightfully eccentric company, and guided by the wisdom of an Indigenous woman who advises him to ask the river just one question, Macfarlane travels through territory so rugged that “even the trout have portage trails,” returning with hard-won wisdom about our evanescence and, one hopes, a river’s permanence and power to shape our lives for the better.
Are rivers alive? Macfarlane delivers a lucid, memorable argument in the affirmative.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780393242133
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: March 8, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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