Discoveries

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The Reindeer People

Living With Animals and

Spirits in Siberia

Piers Vitebsky

Houghton Mifflin: 480 pp., $28

PIERS VITEBSKY, head of anthropology and Russian northern studies at the Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge, has been visiting Sebyan, Siberia, in the Verkhoyansk Mountains, for 20 years to study the Eveny people and the reindeer that for centuries they have depended on for fur, food and transportation. The ancestors of the Eveny were from northeastern China; because of their close relationship with reindeer, which migrate enormous distances and are perfectly adapted to cold (winter temperatures in Sebyan are as low as minus 96 degrees Fahrenheit), the Eveny spread from Mongolia to the Arctic Ocean, from the Pacific to the Urals. There is an ancient association (pre-Santa Claus!), Vitebsky writes, between reindeer and flying. “Reindeer stones” on 3,000-year-old Bronze Age grave sites depict them lifting human souls up to the sun.

After 1917, the Communist Party confined all reindeer on state farms, to force a non-nomadic life on the Eveny, who formerly migrated each year with the reindeer. Shamans were killed, wooden houses built, bureaucrats appointed. Vitebsky befriends several families and brings his own wife and daughters (who are given their own reindeer) to Sebyan. He imparts much information, along with the smoky smell of the reindeer’s deep fur, the colors of winter lichen, the stony rivers, the feel of wind on the taiga. The River Ob, the Yamal Peninsula -- the place names alone are the stuff of Narnia dreams.

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The Naming of Names

Anna Pavord

Bloomsbury: 472 pp., $45

FROM Guyana’s rain forest to 17th century England to the Tien Shan Mountains of Central Asia to ancient Greece and Germany and back again, we are the beneficiaries of the people who name plants. “What was the process by which all these fabulous plants found new, universally understood names after they had arrived in foreign lands, far from home?” Anna Pavord asks. She begins with the Greek Theophrastus in 3rd century BC, the first to show an interest in all plants, not just those with medicinal value. “The soul of the plant,” wrote Theophrastus, lies “at the junction of its root and its stem.” She notes the contributions of Pliny the Elder, the Greek doctor Dioscorides (author of “De Materia Medica”), the 16th century Carthusian monk Otto Brunfels and his “Herbarum Vivae Eicones,” and many others. Pavord ends with the work of English botanist John Ray (1627-1705), namely his “Historia Plantarum,” with its pre-Linnaean rules of classification.

The plates are intoxicating: the Cedar of Lebanon, the Iris (this one by Albrecht Durer), the male and female mandrakes, the Dracunculus vulgaris, the artemisias and even the lowly cabbage are here rendered ravishingly.

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The Whale Caller

A Novel

Zakes Mda

Farrar, Straus & Giroux:

240 pp., $23

IT is September and the southern right whales draw tourists to Hermanus on South Africa’s west coast. The Whale Caller uses a kelp horn to sing to a whale named Sharisa. Saluni, the town drunk, is jealous of his relationship with the whale (“After all she is only a fish. I am all woman.”) Saluni’s life revolves around the Whale Caller and the Bored Twins, two little girls whose parents go off each day to work in the vineyards, leaving them alone. The lives of the Whale Caller, Saluni and the Bored Twins are floating lives, sidelined but not governed by poverty -- playful, directionless lives, the lives of people made childlike and dependent by an uncaring government.

“The Whale Caller” is flecked with bits of aboriginal stories, fear of the dark, mischievous spirits. Everything explodes in the end (which is hauntingly reminiscent of “The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea”); pressure is let off in all the wrong ways and the world is disgusted by the humans living there.