Tombland by C. J. Sansom: A review

The year is 1549 and things are about to get very interesting in Tudor England. 

Henry VIII has been dead for two years. His son by his third wife, Jane Seymour, Edward VI, is now king. Edward is eleven years old and his uncle, Edward Seymour, rules as regent and Protector.

The Protector has pursued a prolonged and essentially senseless war against Scotland which has led to economic collapse with hyperinflation which makes life even more difficult than usual for the poor. Moreover, after three good harvest years, 1549 threatens to be a very lean year in the countryside. The peasants are restless and rebellion is brewing.

In London, lawyer Matthew Shardlake continues to pursue his profession, now with his assistant Nicholas. Shardlake had been employed by various members of the Tudor regime over the years, lastly by Henry's sixth wife, Catherine Parr. Now his services are utilized by the Lady Elizabeth, Henry's younger daughter by Ann Boleyn, who is fifteen years old. Elizabeth's older sister, Mary, daughter of Catherine of Aragon, is thirty-three.  

Shardlake is called to an audience with Elizabeth concerning a murder in Norwich. A woman named Edith Boleyn had been found murdered there in gruesome circumstances. Elizabeth had belatedly learned that the woman had approached her household seeking help but she had never been informed. Now the woman has been murdered and suspicion has fallen on her husband, John, who is a distant relative of Elizabeth's. She engages Shardlake to travel to Norwich to investigate the situation and ensure that justice is done and, if her kinsman should be found guilty of murder, she instructs Shardlake to request a pardon from the king.

By the time Shardlake and Nicholas arrive in Norwich, the restlessness of the peasants has found expression in open rebellion.  Thousands have banded together under the leadership of Robert Kett and have established a camp on Mousehold Heath from which they issue requests for redress of their grievances. They rely upon the honor of the Protector and the king to deal honorably with them. Inevitably, Shardlake and Nicholas are caught up in this rebellion and in Norwich, they meet another friend: Jack Barak, Shardlake's assistant and friend for many years, is there working for the Court of Assizes.

The major part of the narrative of Sansom's book deals with what is known as Kett's Rebellion. It was only one of many such peasant rebellions that broke out around the country in the summer of 1549, but it was one of the largest. Sansom's extensive research shows in the minutely detailed descriptions of the growth of this camp, its organization, and Robert Kett's insistence on maintaining the forms of legality and his refusal to allow executions in the camp. Shardlake is drafted against his will as an advisor on the law as Kett dispenses justice. Meantime, Shardlake and Nicholas are still pursuing their investigation of the Boleyn matter and trying to ensure that John Boleyn is not hanged. 

Sansom excels in his descriptions of the living conditions and social mores of the times. Those descriptions of the mud, the blood, the screams of the wounded, the rotting bodies, the shit, the flies, and the rats on the battlefields and on the streets and alleys of Norwich were enough to turn my stomach at times. But it was impossible to turn away from it. The aim of historical fiction, after all, is to transport the reader back to that time and give her a sense of what it was like to be alive then. Sansom does that very well. This book is well over 800 pages and it took me a week and a half of determined reading to get through it, but it was worth it.

That being said, I think the book might have been even better with a bit tighter editing. The transitions between the investigation of the death of Edith Boleyn and the rebellion on Mousehold Heath seemed rather disjointed at times. And I was utterly chagrined to find Sansom committing the capital grammatical offense of repeatedly misusing the pronoun "I" as the object of verbs and prepositions, as in "He gave the statement to Nicholas and I." Really, C.J.? How standards have fallen! Mrs. Rubenstein, my high school English teacher, would be appalled and I am appalled on her behalf.

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Poetry Sunday: Winter Syntax by Billy Collins

I love the imagery which Billy Collins employs in this poem to express the difficulty of writing literature, of expressing a complete and comprehensible thought. He likens it to a "lone traveler heading into a blizzard at midnight." As he struggles against the elements, he thinks of all the things that it would be easier for him to do. And yet he persists until at dawn a smile will appear in his "beard of icicles" and the lone traveler will, at last, be able to express a complete thought.

Winter Syntax

by Billy Collins

A sentence starts out like a lone traveler
heading into a blizzard at midnight,
tilting into the wind, one arm shielding his face,
the tails of his thin coat flapping behind him.

There are easier ways of making sense,
the connoisseurship of gesture, for example.
You hold a girl's face in your hands like a vase.
You lift a gun from the glove compartment
and toss it out the window into the desert heat.

These cool moments are blazing with silence.
The full moon makes sense. When a cloud crosses it
it becomes as eloquent as a bicycle leaning
outside a drugstore or a dog who sleeps all afternoon
in a corner of the couch.

Bare branches in winter are a form of writing.
The unclothed body is autobiography.
Every lake is a vowel, every island a noun.

But the traveler persists in his misery,
struggling all night through the deepening snow,
leaving a faint alphabet of bootprints
on the white hills and the white floors of valleys,
a message for field mice and passing crows.

At dawn he will spot the vine of smoke
rising from your chimney, and when he stands
before you shivering, draped in sparkling frost,
a smile will appear in the beard of icicles,
and the man will express a complete thought.

This week in birds - #340

A roundup of the week's news of birds and the environment:

Early in the week, my birdfeeders looked something like this. They were covered in finches - here American Goldfinches and Pine Siskins, but also Purple Finches. By the end of the week, most of these visitors had moved on. We had temperatures in the 70s and 80s F for much of the week so maybe that convinced the birds that it was time to migrate north toward their breeding grounds.

*~*~*~*

The bulldozers have moved in at the National Butterfly Center in Mission, Texas, and construction of a wall there is expected to begin soon. The Center is still fighting to stop the destruction of the butterfly habitat and has requested an emergency restraining order. Construction of the wall threatens the region's growing ecotourism industry and most local people oppose it.

*~*~*~*

NASA scientists announced this week that it is now official that 2018 was the planet's fourth hottest in nearly 140 years of record-keeping and it represents a continuation of Earth's warming trend.

*~*~*~*

Successful strategies for saving endangered wildlife in a land that is torn by war would seem to be an almost impossible assignment, and yet there is such a success story: The snow leopard is making a comeback in Afghanistan, a country that has been in conflict for much of the last century. Such stories must give us hope.

*~*~*~*

 And, in other happy news, Wisdom has a new chick! The 68-year-old Laysan Albatross and her mate, Akeakamai, who appears in the picture above with the new baby, have nested at this same site on Midway Atoll since 2006.

*~*~*~*

Feeding birds, especially in winter, is one of the country's most popular wildlife-watching activities, but if you are going to put up a bird feeder, it is important to keep in mind bird safety when you plan the placement of the feeder.

*~*~*~*

Two chemical components of popular sunscreens, oxybenzone and octinoxate, have been shown to be damaging to coral reefs. Based on that information, some places are banning those sunscreens. The latest is Key West which will ban the sale of the sunscreens within the city limits. Earlier Hawaii became the first state to pass such a ban.

*~*~*~*

Australia has had more than its share of extreme weather this season - summer for them. Record heat waves, wildfires, and now floods. Record levels of rain have deluged northeastern Australia prompting flooding and emergency evacuations and forcing crocodiles and snakes out of their habitats and into populated areas. 

*~*~*~*

The Sarus Crane is a non-migratory member of the crane family found in various parts of the Indian Subcontinent, southeast Asia, and Australia. Like many members of that family, it has been on the decline but a concerted effort at public education by governmental and conservation agencies has helped to involve farmers in helping to protect and preserve the species and has had a positive effect on the birds' population.

*~*~*~*

In winter, European Starlings gather in great flocks called murmurations that put on incredible acrobatic displays of flying. How do they do it? And why do they do it? Maybe just for fun!



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A fossil of an ancient animal from 240 million years ago called a Pappochelys has been found to have had a cancerous leg bone, proving that the disease has been present on Earth at least since that time. The animal was a shell-less ancestor of turtles. 

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The Prairie Ecologist gives us more information about the migration of dragonflies.

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Dead seabirds called Guillemots have been washing up on the Dutch coast by the thousands this winter. The cause of the birds' mass deaths is still unknown but a spill by a container ship is suspected.

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The location of Earth's magnetic field is important to know because it aids in ensuring that navigational systems function properly. The thing is, that magnetic field fluctuates and scientists are engaged in tracking it. The magnetic North Pole wanders around the Arctic and that's the point that our compasses recognize as north, which is different from the actual geographic North Pole. 

*~*~*~*

Environmental groups and scientists have scored at least a temporary victory in the battle to protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge from oil and gas explorations. The plan for seismic testing to search for oil and gas deposits has been called off for this season.

Image from The New York Times.

For now, this mother and calf from the Porcupine caribou herd of ANWR are safe from such explorations.

*~*~*~*

Three years ago a new volcanic island sprang up from the ocean surrounding Tonga. That land mass is now covered in a mysterious sticky mud and scientists are studying how the island is being colonized by vegetation and by birds.

Throwback Thursday: The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert

Five years ago this month, I read The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert. It's a book whose theme has stayed with me in the five years since. Today there is even more evidence that Earth is undergoing the sixth extinction (that we know about) in the history of the planet and, in fact, that that extinction is snowballing. It is not a comforting thought.

~~~

Thursday, February 27, 2014

The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert: A review

The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"In pushing other species to extinction, humanity is busy sawing off the limb on which it perches."
                                 - Stanford ecologist Paul Ehrlich

As far as science has been able to determine, there have been five mass extinctions of life on Earth in the history of our planet. The first of these occurred at the end of the Ordovician period of the Paleozoic era about 450 million years ago. The second occurred less than 100 million years later in the late Devonian period. There followed the End-Permian extinction of some 250 million years ago, the Late Triassic extinction of 200 million years ago, and finally, the last one and the one we are most familiar with, the End-Cretaceous extinction which occurred about 65 million years ago. That's the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. (Well, almost - except for the ancestors of birds.)

The best evidence seems to indicate that all of these extinctions except for the last one were the result of climatological events, often relatively sudden events to which plants and animals did not have time to adapt. The cause of the fifth one was also a change in climate but it was brought about by a collision with an asteroid. That cataclysmic event so altered the climate of the planet for a time that many, many species died out either suddenly or over a period of years.

Scientists believe that we are now in the midst of the sixth extinction which Earth has endured and that this extinction is entirely human-caused. Elizabeth Kolbert writes in this book about how our species has altered life on the planet as no other species has before. It's not just that we are changing the climate for the worse, although that certainly is a big part of it, we also have altered the face of Earth and the chemistry of the oceans to the detriment of very many species.

One of the biggest problems that we have created for other species is simply the fact that we move everything around and wherever we go on Earth, it seems that some species hitch a ride with us. So a species from Asia that would never under normal circumstances make it to the Americas is brought here either wittingly or unwittingly and it wreaks havoc. Kolbert points out that the most endangered family of animals on Earth today are the amphibians. They are being wiped out by a fungus that has been spread around the world by humans.

Kolbert writes about a dozen species, some of them already irrevocably lost and others on their way out. Through these very personal stories of that wonderful bird the Great Auk, the Panamanian golden frog, staghorn coral, the Sumatran rhino and others, the reader is moved to begin to understand the enormity of what is happening. What we are causing to happen to our world.  

It all reminds me a bit of another subject that I wrote about here recently - the nihilistic ramblings of Rust Cohle, one of the detectives on the HBO series, "True Detective." At one point, he delivers this soliloquy:

I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in evolution. We became too self-aware, nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself, we are creatures that should not exist by natural law. We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self; an accretion of sensory, experience and feeling, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody is nobody. Maybe the honorable thing for our species to do is deny our programming, stop reproducing, walk hand in hand into extinction, one last midnight, brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal.

Reading Kolbert's book is enough to make one think that perhaps Cohle is on to something there.

It is somewhat surprising to learn that the concept of extinction is not a very old one. Kolbert points out that it was first articulated by Georges Cuvier in the revolutionary Paris of the 18th century. As always it seems, with any new scientific idea or concept, it took a while for it to be accepted, but later work by paleontologists has confirmed Cuvier's findings.

This is a well-written book which can popularize scientific concepts and principles for a mass audience. It is an easy read and a fairly short one at less than 300 pages. Kolbert includes extensive notes and bibliography for those who wish to read more on the subject.


View all my reviews

(Update: There is an interesting article entitled "The Mammoth Cometh" in The New York Times Magazine today about the effort to recreate some extinct animals through cloning.)

Wordless Wednesday: Spring?

Poetry Sunday: The Garden in Winter by Lucy Maud Montgomery

The garden in winter can appear to be a pretty barren place, but as Lucy Maud Montgomery surely understood... 

"Safe beneath the snowdrifts lie 

Rainbow buds of by-and-by" 

and 

"Though the winds are keen and chill

Roses' hearts are beating still" 

The barrenness is an illusion; in fact, the garden in winter is full of life. And dreams.

The Garden in Winter

by Lucy Maud Montgomery

Frosty-white and cold it lies 
Underneath the fretful skies; 
Snowflakes flutter where the red 
Banners of the poppies spread, 
And the drifts are wide and deep 
Where the lilies fell asleep. 

But the sunsets o'er it throw 
Flame-like splendor, lucent glow, 
And the moonshine makes it gleam 
Like a wonderland of dream, 
And the sharp winds all the day 
Pipe and whistle shrilly gay. 

Safe beneath the snowdrifts lie 
Rainbow buds of by-and-by; 
In the long, sweet days of spring 
Music of bluebells shall ring, 
And its faintly golden cup 
Many a primrose will hold up. 

Though the winds are keen and chill 
Roses' hearts are beating still, 
And the garden tranquilly 
Dreams of happy hours to be­
In the summer days of blue 
All its dreamings will come true. 

This week in birds - #339

A roundup of the week's news of birds and the environment:

Image from ABC.

The American Bird Conservancy's Bird of the Week is the Great Horned Owl, an adaptable bird that can be found in a wide variety of habitats from tropical and boreal forests to deserts. There are estimated to be around 3.9 million of these hunters, sometimes called "winged tigers" or "tigers of the air," in the United States and Canada. They are quite active and vociferous at this time of year. There has been one serenading me from the live oaks in my front yard during the nights of this week. It's always a thrill to hear those deep, booming calls.

*~*~*~*

Climate scientists have been warning us for years that the heating up of the planet will create more extreme weather conditions. We've had a prime example of that this week with the polar vortex creating record cold in the Midwest, while on the flip side of the planet, in the southern hemisphere, record heat continues to be the story of the day. Australia is burning and wildfires are raging there while Chicago shivers.

*~*~*~*

In yet another unintended consequence of the recent government shutdown, when park employees were able to return to Point Reyes National Seashore in California, they found that Drakes Beach, which is a part of it, had been taken over by elephant seals many of which had given birth to their pups there. And for now at least those seals aren't going anywhere. 

*~*~*~*

In recent years, starfish by the millions have been dying of a wasting disease along the Pacific Coast from Mexico to Alaska. This week a paper detailing research which names the ultimate culprit in creating favorable conditions for the disease was published in the journal Science Advances; unsurprisingly, that culprit is the warming of the oceans created by climate change.

*~*~*~*

But in the mountains of Mexico, the news is good this winter. The population of the overwintering Monarch butterflies there has increased by 144% over last year. It seems that in spite of the difficult year experienced by western Monarchs, the eastern branch of the family which migrates to Mexico for the winter had a very good year.

Image of wintering butterflies courtesy of The Guardian. 

*~*~*~*

A short-term study of the Great Gray Owls of California following last year's wildfires has revealed evidence that the birds are doing quite well. They have proved very resilient in the face of the challenges posed by the fires. However, there will be long-term consequences of the fires that will potentially provide additional risks for the birds.

*~*~*~*

Beavers are thought of as residents of freshwater areas and so they are, but some of them do venture into intertidal zones. In the state of Washington, scientists are hoping that these creatures will help to restore the ecosystem along the coast.

*~*~*~*

This year marks the centennial of the Grand Canyon National Park. Many of the animals that make their homes there are facing new challenges as the park turns 100; they are having to move farther north to compensate for the warming climate. Now an advocacy group called the Wildlands Network is calling for the creation of a wildlife corridor linking the Grand Canyon with other public lands in the West to make it easier for these animals to move.

*~*~*~*

Another species facing the uncertainties of climate change and drought are Arizona's saguaros, those iconic and stately cacti that are indelibly imprinted on our imaginations of what a desert is. They have their champions among scientists as well as citizen scientists who are monitoring the growth of new plants.

*~*~*~*

Another desert species, the Joshua trees of Joshua Tree National Park, were vandalized and, in some cases, irreparably damaged by humans during the recent government shutdown. A former superintendent of the park says that it could take hundreds of years for the area to recover from the damage the visitors caused.

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In the high Arctic, one of the most remote areas on Earth, genes associated with antibiotic-resistant superbugs have been discovered. They may have been carried there either by birds or by humans, but this is a clear indication of the rapid spread and global nature of the resistance problem.

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We know that animals can be very adaptable. It is a thread on which we can hang our hopes for the future of life on the planet. Black bears, for example. When small drones were used to track wildlife in areas with black bears, at first the bears were afraid of them, but gradually, they became habituated to seeing the drones and ignored them. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? I'm not sure.

*~*~*~*

Native bees are extremely important to the ecosystems in which they live. The Maya know that and some are attempting to help the bees by reviving ancient arts of Mayan beekeeping.

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The axolotl, sometimes called the Mexican walking fish, is actually a salamander and, like some others of its kind, it possesses a superpower: It can regrow limbs. Scientists are studying them to see if this superpower could somehow help humans to regenerate lost limbs.

*~*~*~*

We think of roads as being detrimental to ecosystems as they fragment habitats and make it more difficult and dangerous for animals to move from one area to another. But in some situations roads can actually have a positive effect. For example, in the tropics, road proximity may boost songbird nesting success.

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The Sierra Club is feeling hopeful about climate change in 2019. Here's a list of ten reasons why.