BOOKSHELF

Natural History, March, 2000

The Pepper Trail: History and Recipes From Around the World, by Jean Andrews (University of North Texas Press, 1999; $50; 261 pp.)

The dispersal of Capsicum peppers (of prehistoric Bolivian origin)--which accelerated when Columbus brought them back to Spain after his first voyage--has made them, after salt, probably the world's most popular condiment. Andrews describes more than twenty-five species and offers recipes for such unlikely edibles as Arizona chiltepin ice cream, roasted bell-pepper mousse, and jalapeno truffles.

Orchid Fever: A Horticultural Tale of Love, Lust, and Lunacy, by Eric Hansen (Pantheon Books, 2000; $23; 288 pp.)

While examining the "lunatic fringe of the orchid world," Hansen exposes the failure of the 1973 Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) to protect orchids. Along the way, the reader is treated to a dazzling array of facts and lore on a plant family encompassing some 25,000 naturally occurring species and 100,000 artificial hybrids, some of which are used in products ranging from ice cream and aphrodisiacs to pig feed, adhesives, and medicine for sick elephants.

Brother Astronomer: Adventures of a Vatican Scientist, by Brother Guy Consolmagno (McGraw-Hill, 2000; $24.95; 256 pp.)

An American baby boomer of Italian and Irish ancestry, Consolmagno worked as a planetary scientist at MIT, spent two years in Kenya in the Peace Corps, and taught physics at Lafayette College before joining the Jesuits at the age of thirty-seven and becoming curator of the Vatican Observatory's collection of some 1,000 meteorites. The book mingles memoir with theology and science and includes a particularly memorable chapter on meteorite hunting in Antartica.

Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe, by Peter Douglas Ward and Donald Brownlee (Copernicus, 2000; $27.50; 333 pp.)

Basing their theory on, among other things, Earth's unique features and conditions, paleontologist Ward and astronomer Brownlee believe that microbial life-forms probably permeate the galaxies but that complex life may exist almost nowhere.

Journey of the Pink Dolphins: An Amazon Quest, by Sy Montgomery (Simon and Schuster, 2000; $26; 317 pp.)

Weaving together legend and natural history, Montgomery lyrically portrays the Amazon's freshwater dolphins, which are thought to descend from toothed whales that entered the river before the formation of the Andes interrupted the Amazon's westward flow to the Pacific.

Tigers in the Snow, by Peter Matthiessen (North Point Press, 2000; $25; 169pp.)

Those who enjoyed Dersu the Tapper, a nineteenth-century tale of exploration in Kussia's Far East, or Akira Kurosawa's film Dersu Uzala, can return to the coastal Sikhote-Alin Mountains--now a 1,340-square-mile wildlife reserve--via Matthiessen's report on the Siberian tiger. His account also touches on the fate of other tiger populations that once ranged from eastern Turkey to the Sea of Japan.

Linnaeus: Nature and Nation, by Lisbet Koerner (Harvard University Press, 1999; $39.95; 320 pp.)

The fame of Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus rests on the system of nomenclature for organisms that he began to develop in the 1730s. According to Harvard historian of science Koerner, Linnaeus was no visionary modernist but a provincial eccentric who, incorporating the mercantile ideas of his day, dreamed of somehow creating a tropical empire in Nordic climes.

The books in "Natural Selections" are usually available from the Museum Shop of the American Museum of Natural History, (212) 769-5150.