Islands in the Stream of Fact, Fantasy

Portraits of Miniature Worlds by Louise B. Young (Freeman, $23.95, hardcover).

“Throughout human history, islands have held a special place in the minds, the imaginations and the affections of mankind,” Young writes. “What are the special secrets of their charm?”

This handsome volume provides answers. Some will immediately ring true to any traveler who has set foot on an island beach. Others may even enlighten the lucky folks who have spent entire lives on some distant tropical atoll.

Young’s observations are often lyrical: “On a sunny day on a warm tropical island, the dominant sensation is the color blue--a tone that suggests both beauty and mystery. The waters are blue with an intensity that defies their crystal clarity.”

But she is, by trade, an environmentalist and geophysical scientist, and therein lies her greatest strength as she explores Hawaii, Easter Island, the Galapagos, Indonesia’s Bali and Lombok, Madagascar, Mauritius, the Seychelles, Sri Lanka, Crete and Santorini, Iceland, the Bahamas and coral atolls, offering lucid insights from a perspective that is largely ecological (in the broad meaning).

Then, at book’s end, Young takes an odd but intriguing detour from her fairly straightforward scientific approach.

The penultimate chapter discusses the presumably mythical island of Atlantis. Young is not naive, and she examines the distant possibility that such a lost world existed by weighing the empirical evidence. But she doesn’t hesitate to wax philosophical: “The presence of a mysterious culture that was said to have been very advanced awakens the hope of discovering unrealized potential in human beings.”

This leads to her final chapter, in which she puts the other islands into the context of the larger land (and water) mass that encompasses them, an island floating in the cosmic sea: Earth.

She offers this description of the planet, from Lewis Thomas, who wrote “The Lives of a Cell”:

“It is the only exuberant thing in this part of the cosmos. It has the organized, self-contained look of a live creature, full of information, marvelously skilled in handling the sun.”

Young’s conclusion: “It is not too late to save the island Earth, but time is growing short.”

NATURAL HISTORY OF THE ISLANDS OF CALIFORNIA by Allan A. Schoenherr, C. Robert Feldmeth and Michael J. Emerson (University of California Press, $45, hardcover).

If “Islands” is sometimes rhapsodic, this book is always the opposite. That’s not to say the authors lack passion for the wonders of the islands in question: the Channel Islands, Ano Nuevo, the Farallons and the islands of San Francisco Bay. Rather, they express their excitement in the subdued poetics of science. The illustrations by Emerson and David Mooney do exactly what’s intended: improve understanding of the science.

The small landmasses off the California shore, the authors note, afford visitors the chance to discover “a California ‘time warp,’ a place seemingly frozen in time.”

As Darwin noticed in the Galapagos, to study the ecology of an island is to glimpse microcosmic views of natural selection at work.

This terrific volume is not just for researchers, though. What sailor who has watched seaweed float by, for instance, could fail to take joy in the term “sweepstakes dispersal,” an explanation of species diversity based on the theory that chance determines which animals, when washed to sea by mainland floods, will ride log or vegetation “rafts” safely to an island they might then populate.

Divers, meanwhile, will take practical advice not only from the discussion and line drawings of fish and seaweed, but from this sort of interesting tidbit: There’s evidence that the reason great white sharks often spit out scuba divers and surfers after taking a bite is because those sportsmen are unappetizingly lean compared to a big, fat seal or sea elephant.

Quick trips

MOUNTAIN BIKING UTAH (also WYOMING, CHICO and FLAGSTAFF/SEDONA) (Falcon, $19.95, $14.95, $10.95, $10.95 respectively, paper).

These four volumes provide a sampler of Falcon’s 13 regional mountain biking guides. Utah, as any aficionado knows, is the land of slickrock riding, and this guide offers fine maps and descriptions of rides in the overrun mecca of Moab and in less well known areas, such as the single-track paradise near St. George.

The Wyoming guide offers detailed information on trips in some of the West’s most beautiful (and romantic-sounding) locales, including the Medicine Bow National Forest, the Bighorn Basin, the Grand Tetons and the Wind River Range. The smaller, more localized guides are packed with tips for two- to 20-mile rides around such outdoorsy haunts as Flagstaff, Ariz., and Chico, Calif.

FODOR’S WORLD WEATHER GUIDE by E.A. Pearce and C.G. Smith (Random House, $17.95).

The factoids are interesting: Afghanistan is the most easterly country to get its rainfall from the Mediterranean Sea, while its southern mountains shield it from the subcontinent’s monsoons. Zimbabwe has “a healthy and generally pleasant climate around the year.” This guide’s strength, though, is in its charts showing not just temperatures and precipitation but also an index of discomfort from heat and humidity.