Books of My Childhood—Part 2/4 Early Science

And so now we move on to the science portion of our show. These were the books that impressed me during the first decade or so of my life and helped shape my understanding of the world.

Science Book of Volcanoes

This book absolutely fascinated me back in grade three and started a long obsession with volcanoes. It focused, in part, on the story of the eruption of Vesuvius, and the dooming of the towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum... one of those morbid things that seem to really sink hooks into certain kids. In fact, it led more or less directly to me creating one of the first stories I ever finished: a comic, drawn in grade four on lined paper in a notebook, called K.K.V., "King Killer Volcano". In it, an evil scientist brings a volcano to life; it grows a face and arms and legs of lava, and proceeds to terrorize the world while challenging other volcanoes to duels, and finally losing to the might of Vesuvius. I still have that comic. It's just awful. But it's mine. :)

In the Days of the Dinosaurs

What kid doesn't go through a phase where they're fascinated with dinosaurs? Just about the time you realize monsters aren't real, you discover that, yeah, for a while, they actually were! This book was practically the Bible for the boys in my third grade class. There's a lot of information in this book that's now outdated, but we ingrained every fact, name, and dimension into our memories through constant and repeated readings. On days when it was too cold or rainy to go outside for recess, there we'd be, huddled in the corner on the floor, making dinosaurs out of plasticine.

There are facts from this book I still remember. The earliest discovery of dinosaurs being equated to roughly the time of the death of George Washington. The sad, then-mysterious ending of the age the dinosaurs ruled. That dinosaurs came from huge eggs, often laid in great clusters, which always made me think of giant chickens... ironic, given that by the time I was in my twenties, I was hearing the astonishing idea that birds are, in fact, the last extant line of the dinosaurs, and those things wheeling in the sky and looking so delicious on the plate are actually dinosaurs. I'm still trying to wrap my head around the idea that tyrannosaurus (among others) probably wandered the world wreathed in feathers. I think the thing that really stayed with me, though, was the idea that that ancient world, in which they were the overlords for so, so long, had to move aside in order for us to be here, and what we are, now. The idea that our existence might not have been inevitable was a truly profound revelation at the age of 8.

Stars and Planets

For a couple of years, I lugged this book everywhere. It came with four pages of perforated stickers you had to lick and stick in the appropriate boxes. Each page had a separate topic, along with a line drawing suitable for colouring... which I did. I loved the hell out of this book when I was 7 and 8. I was mostly interested in the topics about the planets in our solar system; less interested in the other aspects of astronomy such as stars and galaxies. That seems natural enough to me now; it was a moment in time when the US and the Soviet Union were actively sending probes to the planets, so that was in the news a lot. I remember Pioneers 10 and 11, and not long afterwards Voyagers 1 and 2, beginning the exploration of the outer planets; at about the same time, Vikings 1 and 2 had landed on Mars. These were all real places; when I was a child, for the first time in human history, you could actually see photographs of them, just as real as ones of Paris or Tokyo or Rio de Janeiro. That was new, and it was happening right then. This book was my portable little piece of all that.

I found a copy of it a year or two ago and bought it. I scanned all the pages, including the stickers, and then "pasted" the stickers onto the scanned pages in Photoshop. I coalesced the whole thing together into a PDF that I shared with a buddy who also had a fascination with such things as a boy. I guess you don't grow out of everything as you get older. :)

Stars

This was a rather more sophisticated version of Stars and Planets; a field guide to amateur astronomy. It was the kind of thing a kid with a little telescope (not that I had one) out in a field on a summer night would have found useful. Again, I was mostly interested in what it had to say about the planets of our solar system, although there was enough of interest about other topics to finally get me at least passingly interested. I think the thing that really caught my attention was the suggestion that the pole star changes over time as the 'point' of the Earth's axis of rotation itself turns, over many, many thousands of years... That while it is, today, Polaris, that is has been in the past Vega, and eventually will be again. Something about that made me feel tied to a universe greater than me. It wasn't all just here to support me; quite the opposite: I was just a momentary bubble on a great wave passing through that had existed long before me and would carry on long after I was gone.

Extinct Animals

I still remember the ride home from the mall, poring over this book in the back seat. It was the first time the fragility of life was really impressed upon me; the first time I ever realized that extinction wasn't just something that happened to the dinosaurs millions of years ago, but had happened in the very recent past, and was potentially still going on around me even then.

Two stories really stood out for me. One was the tale of the passenger pigeon. The idea that the most abundant species of bird in North America had, all in space of a single human lifetime, gone from the billions to none at all, was sobering... if I can say that of a 10-year-old boy. That they could even identify the last living individual, a bird named Martha in the Cincinnati Zoo, and the very day and hour the species became literally extinct, gripped me in a way little else has.

The other story was the utter extermination of the native people of Tasmania, including the horrifying illustration of a white settler shooting a nude, black-skinned man in the back. It seems kind of inappropriate to me now to number a race of human beings among extinct "animals", even if it is taxonomologically valid. However, I can't say I'm sorry I was exposed to the realization... it was an important one, and was one more thing that helped to shape the person I became and the values that matter to me.

Primitive Man

This is one of the few childhood keepsakes I have. It's not one of the books I've managed to find and buy retrospectively as an adult, but actually one I've managed to keep hold of through myriad moves and upheavals since 1977. I'm pretty sure it's the earliest book I still possess of which I am the original owner.

I was, if I remember correctly, 9 when I got this book, probably in a supermarket as we shopped for groceries. I absorbed myself in the book in the back of the car on the way home, and I was blown away by the revelations in it. The world and how it worked were coming into real focus as I went through the pages. But it was also kind of unsettling. The world that I knew simply just was. It had always been like this and always would be; the only real changes were the new things we invented. Now I was starting to understand that no long ago, nothing I knew from my world would have existed... even the people in it. Nature wasn't just all the stuff around the human world; the human world, and human beings themselves, were a part of nature and necessarily embedded in it; that we are, for all our special abilities, actually just another species of animal. But as I read along, I came to a passage that was kind of a lifeline. It was a simple line; just a few words, but somehow, it made everything else okay. It somehow remoored everything to a foundation, and safely so emboldened, I felt free to explore more. I'll quote the passage from the book, and highlight in blue where the author encapsulated my fears, and then in red the words that still resonate with me more than forty years later...

Do all people believe the theory of evolution

When Darwin's books on evolution were printed a hundred years ago, many people said Darwin did not believe in God's plan, but in a horrible universe run by lucky accidents and greedy fighting. They said he was making man out to be nothing more than a smart ape. But these people need not have worried. The theory of evolution says certain things happened. It does not say, and it could not say, why those things happened. If God made the world and runs the world, then evolution is God's plan. And it is a majestic and beautiful plan. With evolution, even accidents are part of the plan of life, and even the lowest creature is part of the family life. The theory of evolution does not say man is only a smart kind of ape. It says that for two billion years living forms were tried and improved and tried in improved in preparation for the arrival of man as we know him upon the scene of life upon the earth.

Well, this more or less rounds out the books that really affected me in some key, important way up to the time I was 12 and we moved from Nova Scotia to Ontario. Moving on, I'll be looking at the books that helped shape my opinions and understanding in my teenage years. Coming up next! :)