Review: Books

The Alienist
By Hal Espen

The Future in Plain Sight, by Eugene Linden (Simon & Schuster, $25). Technology and science writer Linden has also used the Cold War period as a point of departure, but his concern is our environmental, biological, and social prospects for the coming century. "In retrospect, what threats were obscured and ignored during the West's 50-year obsession with communist expansion?" he asks. "What future should we be preparing for?" The result is a bracing, speculative, but strongly researched look into the crystal ball. Linden maintains that we are in the midst of what may be a golden era, the product of half a century without a major world war or any extreme disruption of climate stability. Still, significant human-centered change is occurring, with the urban population increasing from 300 million as recently as 1950 to an estimated six billion by 2050-and there is manifest cause for concern. In chapters that read like crisp position papers, Linden considers global warming and the potential for "ecomigration" ("Even a modest sea-level rise of one meter would force a hundred million people to flee river deltas and coastal lowlands"), the ominous decline of biodiversity, the threat of resurgent disease microbes, and a number of other fascinating but anxiety-provoking scenarios. Linden is not a pessimist, however; using our intelligence and passion, he argues, we can find ways to "slip past the dangers."

Wildlife of the Tibetan Steppe, by George B. Schaller (University of Chicago, $55). Schaller's rigorous scientific tome follows close on the heels of Tibet's Hidden Wilderness (1997), an austere coffee-table book of photographs with a text by this distinguished wildlife biologist. Both volumes describe the research that the author has conducted during a series of expeditions to the 130,000-square-mile Chang Tang Reserve in Tibet. The region is remote and inhospitable, but it is also a unique high-altitude ecosystem and one of the earth's great biological treasure troves. Snow leopards, chirus, wild yaks, brown bears, and wolves are among the large mammals that inhabit the steppes, along with 37 bird species, one reptile (a lone lizard named Phrynocephalus teobaldi), and a human population of nomads. Parts of this new book will seem like a dry textbook to the general reader, but it's worth persisting, because along with his data, Schaller provides a stirring model for balancing stringent scientific fieldwork with effective lobbying on behalf of conservation. Modernization and excessive hunting threaten the region, but Schaller has offered inspiring, informed leadership. His final words apply not just to the Tibetan plateau, but to other priceless wilderness preserves around the world: "To bequeath the Chang Tang far into the next millennium will require a never-ending moral vigilance, a passion to understand the ecology, and a deep commitment to a harmonious coexistence between the nomads with their livestock and the wildlife. Without such dedication there will ultimately be a desert where only howling winds break a deadly silence."

Marchlands, by Karla Kuban (Scribner, $23). Set on a Wyoming ranch in the mid-1960s, this graceful first novel is the story of an eventful year in the life of its tough-minded narrator, 15-year-old Sophie Behr. Sophie has a full plate of problems — her alcoholic father is gone, her mother may be losing her mind, her brother and cousin are fighting in Vietnam, and her boyfriend, a ranch hand, has gotten her pregnant — but this young woman's self-possession and keen awareness of the beauty and strangeness of life carry her through her many trials. Kuban does marvelous but unflashy things with the prose in this book, rendering Sophie's lyrical vision and her plain-speaking stoicism with equal clarity, as in these adjurations Sophie offers herself on a lonely, starless night: "Without darkness there are no dreams ... If you have pain, it will be absorbed by darkness.

Photograph by Clay Ellis