Book Blurbs

Laboratory Earth: The Planetary Gamble We Can't Afford to Lose, Stephen Schneider, professor of biological sciences and senior fellow, Institute for International Studies, BasicBooks, 1996; $20 (environmental sciences)

More than 20 years ago, the author predicted that global warming would become "demonstrable" by the turn of the century. Now he revisits the debate he helped start. Distilling 25 years of research, Schneider draws on several disciplines, including biodiversity, geology, population growth and economic development, to explain the environmental complexity of climate change. He derides the media for reducing the issue to a battle between "doomsayers" and "naysayers" and concludes that, left unchecked, human activity will increase the earth's temperature from 2 to 8 degrees Celsius in the next two centuries.

Is the book dead? That's the question explored in this collection of 13 essays about the nature of discourse in the digital era. In the introduction, Nunberg notes that self-proclaimed "computer visionaries" speak of a future in which printed books, brick-and- mortar libraries and traditional publishers are superseded by their electronic counterparts. At the same time, bibliophiles huff about the difficulty of curling up in bed with a CyberMax PROMAX-5. The contributors here, professors from the United States and Europe, steer a middle course. They're enthusiastic about digital technologies but see change coming slowly. By the end of the decade, Nunberg writes, all our current talk about the "end of the book" will sound as dated and quaint as earlier predictions that photography would kill painting and television would kill movies.

In 1991, Pamela Logan, a research scientist in the aerospace industry, set out alone on an expedition to find the Khampas. These fierce warriors from Eastern Tibet had fought the invading Chinese from 1950 until the mid-70s when they dispersed into the mountains. Logan, who holds a third-degree black belt in Shokotan karate, traveled by foot, bike and horseback as well as by train, bus and truck across frozen mountain passes and desolate plains. On her nine-month expedition, funded by a grant from Caltech, she visited Buddhist monasteries and met and worshiped with monks and pilgrims. In the end, she caught only glimpses of the elusive Khampa warriors, but her journey brought her a deeper understanding of Tibetan Buddhism and enabled her to make a spiritual connection between it and her martial arts training.

Did Lincoln make a conditional offer to evacuate Fort Sumter in April 1861? Did he, just a few days before his assassination, dream of a president lying dead in the White House? To whom did he first reveal his intention to issue an emancipation proclamation? Was his mother the illegitimate daughter of a Virginia aristocrat? Like many great men of history, Lincoln is remembered in both factual and fictional terms. This book attempts to separate the wheat from the chaff. The husband and wife team sifted through countless diaries, letters, newspaper interviews and reminiscences. The authors document, classify and evaluate some 1,900 passages attributed to Lincoln by more than 500 people who claimed to have heard the words directly from him. The result is both a collection of quotations and an effort to evaluate the extent to which historians rely on these resources.