Customer Reviews

The Ice Finders: How a Poet, a Professor, and a Politician Discovered the Ice Age

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Edmond Bolles book "The Ice Finders" is a real treat, perhaps the best I've read this year. In this tale of the discovery of the concept of "Ice Age", Bolles weaves together the story of three people of different times and places. We are treated to three biographies of people who played important but very different roles forming a new view and understanding of the world-a view we carry to this day to such an extent it's hard to imagine anything else.

Bolles displays for us an intellectual adventure I'd never thought about before, as well as ego trips, and quixotic expeditions. And what a cast of characters including Charles Darwin, the Lowell's of Massachusetts, Ralph Emerson and others who add great spice to the stories. The book is intellectually stimulating, entertaining and fun. Here is a piece of history I knew nothing about until reading Bolles book. What a bargain-all in one book.

I'm only moderately interested in the history of science, but I love stories about people, and this book is full of great people stories. Besides the three main ones in the title, many minor figures in the story are also well drawn and keep the story moving. I especially liked the German geologist Leopold von Buch and a Scottish newspaper editor, Charles Maclaren. Von Buch shouts insults at Agasiz as he presents his Ice Age theory and he wears high button shoes while he hikes in the mountain. The book has one vivid scene after another and makes the people walk again. I loved it.

This book is a unique blend of story-telling, biography, and science writing. Blair Bolles has done his research well. He captures the passions of Kane, Agassiz, and Lyell with a style that is sharp, thorough, and accessible. There is lots to learn here, but only a pleasant effort required. The pages turn themselves as the reader follows Kane across the polar ice, and the scientists Agassiz and Lyell through several decades of meetings, debate, and discord. At the end of it all, we appreciate the courage and tenacity of Kane, who barely survives. We marvel at the life work of Agassiz and Lyell, who, in spite of those around them, and almost in spite of themselves, shaped the way we think about our world today. Well done!

This is a superbly written book, capturing the drama behind the discovery of the concept of the Ice Age. Bolles tells the story from the perspective of three different 19th century investigators: Kane, a gentleman adventurer, Lyell, one of the founders of modern geology, and Agassiz, one of the world's greatest naturalists. Using what is almost like a diarist method to tell the tale, the author interweaves the points of view of all three individuals taking the reader through the stages of the theory's conception and gestation. It seems amazing that what seems so abundantly apparent to modern students of earth history is blindly missed by many very astute 19th Century scientists. Furthermore, when a clear arguement with supporting data is resisted, it seems almost a willful desire to deny the existance of an Ice Age. Indeed such it may have been, as this was an era when strongly held religious beliefs, which had shaped much of the thinking up to that time, were beginning to crumble. In Ice Finders Bolles expertly creates an exciting and informative history of one of the intellectual adventures of science.

Dava Sobel's Longitude seems to have established a new trend for science and technology writing. Instead of trying to produce broad histories, more books are coming out that focus on a specific area or development.

This one, for example, covers the development of the theory that there was once an "ice age," an era when glaciers covered much of the earth. This was heady stuff for the geologists of the 1830s, already reeling from evidence that the earth was millions or billions of years old, rather than the thousands indicated by the Bible. In fact, one of the tales of this book is the sometimes irrational resistance of established scientists to this radical but evident new concept, as Louis Agassiz turns himself from an establishment figure into a maverick by championing it and guardian of the orthodoxy Charles Lyell, author of the authoritative textbook of geology, first resists it and finally adopts it in a way that suggests he was right all along. The making of science is not always a pretty sight and is often rather different from the tidy displacement of an outdated theory by a more current, better supported one. It's frequently much more of a fight than that, and the theory of an ice age is an example of such.

But that's just one of the threads of this book. The other is the adventure of explorer-poet Elisha Kent Kane, who ostensibly seeks the remains of Franklin's polar expedition, gets stuck in the ice for two years (a harrowing experience related in painful detail), and finally returns with clear documentary evidence of the massive ice formations that Agassiz needs as the final justification for his theory.

The two threads are related in episodes, which gets a little confusing, particularly when one notes that the Kane expedition narrative covers a time period well after most of the Agassiz narrative. However, one quickly gets used to this and moves on.
All in all, it's a very interesting story that shows how science is made.

The history of science and the origins of our contemporary biases are so rarely explored that it was a pleasure to discover Bolles' The Ice Finders. It is quite entertaining in its exposition of the lives of three individuals and their separate, but intertwined, paths to the "discovery" of the Ice Age theory. It is a highly readable, non-technical book, with enough information to nudge someone with a greater interest towards more detailed, sophisticated reading, much like a good magazine article might do. There is at least one startling factual error that should be addressed, however. In a brief passage, the author introduces a supporting figure, Charles-Lucien Bonaparte, patron of Louis Agassiz and a well-known naturalist in his own right. Bonaparte is erroneously identified as Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte's brother. Charles-Lucien was Napoleon's nephew. Although seemingly a minor point, Charles-Lucien is well-known enough that basic research and fact-checking should have caught the error (for further reference see Patricia T. Stroud's excellent and thorough The Emperor of Nature). It made me wonder whether any of the other facts Bolles musters, and with which I am not as familiar, are also wrong. With that in mind, I would still recommend the book for a novel perspective on how scientific minds work, and for a glimpse into the lives of three fascinating individuals.

People are so complacent about their environment, and about what they see as the "received knowledge" of their generation, of their century. We think we are SO SUPERIOR to our ancestors, and yet we are just as ignorant as they were, in their time, and we will, fortunately or unfortunately, be viewed as incredibly backward by our descendants 100 years hence. What makes this book so wonderful is it plays this generation gap out from 150 years ago ... and provides an outstanding overview of how the concept of the ice age came to be. The book is short, can be read in just a sitting or two (and begs to be read that fast). The author has a breezy, sardonic style that is just right. I highly recommend this book

This is a fun little book about the discovery and eventual acceptance of the theory that glaciers used to cover entire continents, creating interesting geologic formations that had been puzzling natural historians before the mid 1800s. The account rotates among the stories of three Europeans who contributed to the discovery. This is not academic, history of science writing, so don't expect precision. Go elsewhere for a well-referenced version of events. Instead, Bolles takes the liberty to interpret what the characters were feeling when they uncovered bits of information and how they reacted to arguments with their collegues ... and these are what makes it such a great read. The fact that one of them was trapped on an artic expedition for an excruciating amount of time also helped keep my attention.

In the early 1800s, geology was making its first major claims on ground previously held by religion. It had become apparent that the sediments of the world did not trace to a single forty-day flood. Plus, fossils of extinct creatures were being identified, suggesting that death had been present in the world before the creation of Man, contrary to the Bible. Now, at the time of this book, the new habit of observing nature without preconceptions was giving rise to the notion that Europe had once been iced over by gigantic glaciers--a form of destruction found nowhere in Scripture. This book is the story of how the glacial hypothesis was broached, how it was hooted down for decades, and then finally accepted once people became acquainted with the giant glaciers of Greenland. The accounts of the exploration of the coast of Greenland are thrilling--this is quite a long way from running climate modeling programs on a computer! This episode in the history of science certainly bears out the importance of imagination, for the idea that the Alps and the Scottish tarns were once locked under moving ice was quite beyond the scientific establishment of the day. In most other popularized science history books I've chanced to read, Louis Agassiz is portrayed as the doddering, hidebound anti-evolutionist. So it is good to see his vibrant, groundbreaking early career told here. This is a very insightful account of how science's view of the world changes under the weight of new evidence, and how it sometimes takes a leap of imagination before everything appears to fit.

Very, very compressed book -- 250 pages to introduce the dominant theories of the time, sketch the characters of some of the people involved, outline the bones of the story, and describe the utter revolution in thinking and beliefs brought about by the discovery (realization) of the Ice Age.

What struck me most were these petty, bickering, status-conscious scientists resolute in their refusal to acknowledge new information even when seen with their own eyes -- refuting obvious conclusions, choosing pride over reality. The bitter rivalries, the entrenched positions, the profound egos of these people, ... you can see it today in the debate over man's role in climate change.

Today, you have scientists and true believers gripping so hard to the theory of anthropogenic global climate change because their personalities and egos are wrapped up in their belief. The book underscores the staggering refusal to consider new evidence on the part of highly esteemed scientists.

I think the book's connection to today's world is glaringly obvious -- the reader *must* conclude that it is an exoneration of global warming "deniers". I'm shocked that it was published.

I'm a fan of the explorer-discoverer-adventurer-survivor genre. This is not the best book I have read of its type -- I liked Endurance better, for one. But as far as describing the theories, personalities, and conflicts of the time as the setting for the exploration, this book is great.