A Short History of Nearly Everything (review) (2003)

to the depressing spectacle, in "The Croak of Obsession," of treasures accumulated only to be discarded at flea markets, these poems variously indict our behavior. Bargen's poetry is intellectually complex, rich in imagery and wordplay (though sometimes the cleverness seems a digression from the pure power of the imagery), emotionally engaging as it evokes the everyday encounters that sometimes help us to feel sheltered but more often remind us of fragility and transience. "Ifyou wait, you grow old, nothing/more. Traveling light is your only/illuminating illusion," Bargen writes in "Map to the Party," a rethinking of the climber's encounter with the storm that achieves a more complex understanding of the necessity of going on. Whether for the pure poetic pleasure of Bargen's expert manipulations of language and poetic tradition , or for the emotional power of his sympathetic encounters with the world, The Body of Water is one volume of poetry to be read and reread with pleasure and with the pain that accompanies deeper understanding. (TD) A Short History ofNearly Everything by Bill Bryson Broadway Books, 2003, 560 pp., $27.50 The photographs taken by NASA of the earth floating in the blackness of space are among the most arresting images of the last fifty years. Those taken from the distance of the moon show the earth as a surprisingly small orb wrapped in a thin, blue, cloud-swirled atmosphere. Like so much else that we have been learning in the last few decades, the image of spaceship earth—this delicate, celllike vessel—suggests the interdependency of life, a subject too long neglected. Most of us are aware that humans are destructive. The full record of our recklessness will neverbe known, although it is increasingly evident that for thousands of years we have been wiping out other species on a weekly basis, often for no apparent reason. In the 18th and 19th centuries , the majority of "new" species of birds or turtles or lizards encountered on islands or island chains were exterminated within a few years. Prehistoric humans and native tribes, with some exceptions, were no different from modern man in this tendency , although the increased human population and destructive activity over the last couple ofhundred years have considerably enhanced our ability to scorch the earth. No one really knows how likely human behavior is to make the earth uninhabitable, but scientists now generally agree that earthwide catastrophes can happen shockingly fast, due to unstoppable chains of events. Much ofwhat we do is by ignorance, and our ignorance—for example, regarding the effects we are having on weather-changing ocean life and on the atmosphere—is vast. One would hope that once we know definitively thatwe are wrecking either the atmosphere or the ocean, we could stop doing it and try to remedy the problem. The truth is that once the "for-sure" light is blinking, it will probably be too late. Global disasters can and have happened repeatedly in earth's history. Paleoanthropologists studying human DNA believe The Missouri Review · 177 that the people currently living on the earth came from a remarkably small population, probably because at some point in the past everybody else was wiped out. These are among the more sobering issues that Bill Bryson discusses in A Short History of Nearly Everything , a book with something ofa dual personality. It begins as a cheerful miscellany of the history of science, starting with the ancients and touching on major figures and fields during succeeding centuries. The author approaches his subjects through the personalities of the scientists. Occasionally , he seems overly concerned to demonstrate, as if to a roomful of bored high school students, that all these people were really weird and interesting. Still, it is amusing to read about such characters as the paranoid genius Isaac Newton, author of the Principia, the most important document in the history of science. Newton was known to do such things as get halfway out of bed and forget to actually stand up. He figured out the basic laws ofphysics with apparently little effort, then spent most of his time fruitlessly puzzling over how to turn heavy metals into gold. The author also depicts many of...