Discoveries

TWO GARDENERS

A Friendship in Letters

By Katharine S. White and Elizabeth Lawrence

Edited by Emily Herring Wilson

Beacon Press: 274 pp., $25

Following her book, “Onward and Upward in the Garden” and her column of the same name that ran in the New Yorker from 1958 until her death in 1977, Katherine White’s fans were legion. After her first column in March 1958, White (then 62) received a warm and appreciative letter from Elizabeth Lawrence, herself a garden writer, author of “The Little Bulbs” and, later, “The Southern Garden.” Lawrence was 54. Their correspondence in the first year of their friendship was formal but burning with a passion for gardening and the joy of sharing sources and tips. White’s garden was in Maine, Lawrence’s in North Carolina. Both show an endearing carefulness about intimacy, each apologizing profusely when some new privacy is revealed. Lawrence recalls her grandmother, who scorned people for being “too d--- friendly.” Nonetheless, their private lives intrude on their gardening. Births and deaths and illnesses become part of the correspondence. They meet once, in New York for lunch, in April 1967, but it has none of the moment of the letters. “Help! Help!” White writes to Lawrence in 1969. “I’m trying to find how often the old-fashioned Night-blooming cereus opens its white flowers at midnight ... in order to capture an event of my quite young childhood.” What are friends for?

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SULTRY CLIMATES

By Ian Littlewood

DaCapo Press: 248 pp., $24

As in real life, ideas are usually more exciting than their execution. Traveling for adventure, including the sexual kind, is one of those dirty little secrets tourists rarely admit to. “Letters home,” writes Ian Littlewood, “commonly tell of the churches visited, not the brothels.” Littlewood begins with an account of the Grand Tour, and James Boswell’s in particular. Undertaken when Boswell was 22, in 1763, it began chastely in Utrecht, the Netherlands, but ended in a frenzy of sexual encounters in Italy. Littlewood then follows Margaret Fuller on her journeys in the mid-1800s: “Once I was almost all intellect; now I am almost all feeling.” He continues with Lord Byron’s travels and rebellion against everything Victorian, Andre Gide’s travels in North Africa, Paul Gauguin’s in Tahiti and many others. “Sultry Climates” is a breathless book, a Grand Tour in and of itself.

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BODY HEAT

Temperature and Life on Earth

By Mark S. Blumberg

Harvard University Press:

236 pp., $22

There’s a little twinkle in Mark S. Blumberg’s eye as he explains the role of temperatures in life on Earth, that essential gleam that makes books about science successful and appealing rather than dull and exclusive. Because temperature presents our greatest environmental challenge, it seems important to understand its properties. Blumberg explains what temperature is and its ways of moving: conduction, radiation, evaporation and convection. He explains the concept of surface area--skin, tree branches, lungs and alveoli--and the effect of temperature on genes, sex determination, the brain, the heart and blood, as well as the role of fevers in fighting disease. He writes a bit about the future, though this is not a book on global warming: “[I]t may be possible,” he writes, “to use the gravitational energy of a large asteroid to nudge the Earth’s orbit outward just enough to increase its distance from the Sun and thereby maintain Earth’s temperature at a suitable level.” His writing is clear, a fine balance of explanation, example and ideas.

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MADNESS

A Brief History

By Roy Porter

Oxford University Press:

234 pp., $21.95

Once upon a time, insanity was thought to be caused by some divine interference: God or Satan. Then came the Age of Reason, when the world was divided into rational and irrational, feeling and consciousness. The more early scientists and philosophers learned about the body, the more madness was described as something organic, related to the humors and the organs. Finally, madness was located in the mind, melancholy and mania both. This is the cosmography of insanity that the late Roy Porter presents in his brief and fascinating history of insanity. Efforts to control madmen and -women, from dunking them in cold water to restraint to confinement and finally drugs are also charted here. Porter describes the first asylums in Europe and the United States, the pioneers in the field and the horrifying rise, even as the study of mental health grew, in the sheer numbers of depressed and deranged people. What has caused this leap? Porter leaves the reader wondering, waiting for the next chapter in the future of madness.