The Bonehunters' Revenge: Dinosaurs, Greed, and the Greatest Scientific Feud of the Gilded Age, by David Rains Wallace (Houghton Mifflin, $24). In this cautionary tale of professional jealousy, one of our finest writers on natural history (The Monkey's Bridge, The Klamath Knot) has
unearthed long-buried details surrounding the feud between nineteenth-century paleontologists Edward Drinker Cope, a talented amateur, and Othniel C. Marsh, a professor at Yale. The two began as friends, but after Marsh mocked Cope for reconstructing a plesiosaur with its skull stuck on its tail, they turned on each other in one of the ugliest spats in
scientific history, and were soon ransacking the badlands of the West for fossils they could be first to identify and name. Wallace finds a bizarre villain behind the scandal: New York Herald owner James Gordon Bennett Jr., a "controlled alcoholic sociopath" who, in another immortal pairing, sent
Stanley in search of Livingstone but was banished from New York society after he "urinated in the fireplace (or grand piano) of his fiancée's parlor during a gala party." In 1890, Bennett fanned the flames of the scientists' rancor, publishing their accusations of plagiarism, theft, spying, and insanity. The feud had serious repercussions, tarnishing
the reputations of both combatants as well as undermining the clout of Marsh supporter John Wesley Powell and disrupting his plans to protect vast western lands. Ultimately Wallace questions whether science itself, in these days of such life-or-death matters as global warming, can afford "rivalry's vanity, greed, and hatred."
Fencing the Sky, by James Galvin (Henry Holt, $23). Poet Galvin's first novel opens with a scene ready-made for Hollywood. Mike Arans, a hippie-cum-cowboy who has fled to Wyoming to escape a messy past (the FBI mistakenly fingered him for plotting to blow up the Liberty Bell), literally reaches the end of his rope when
obnoxious real-estate developer Merriweather Snipes spooks Mike's cows with his ATV once too often. Astride his trusty steed, Potatoes, Mike ropes Snipes right off the four-wheeler and snaps his neck, then leaves a note on the body reading, "I did this. Mike Arans," and rides off into the sunset. One of Mike's best friends, an Apache tracker named Jim, is
soon hot on his trail, and their low-speed chase yields flashbacks of the lives of Mike and his prairie pals, featuring tragicomic acts of horseback derring-do that evoke the dusty idealism of ranch life. Galvin's writing can be a bit too beautiful (the darkness is "fecund," the forest "loden-dark"), but it is also canny and funny: In the high desert, Mike
feels like "a flea on a Frisbee"; environmentalists remind another character of "Tammy Wynette and Savonarola trapped in one body." As a novelist, Galvin might study up on ambiguity—all developers and newcomers are bad, all cowboys good—but this novel, like his nonfiction work, The Meadow, is a haunting immersion in
the slow death of a way of life. As Mike says of his own fate (which takes an astonishing turn), "All that remained was the end of the story."
The Emperor's Embrace: Reflections on Animal Families and Fatherhood, by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (Pocket Books, $24). Masson, who spent the first half of his checkered career consigning psychiatry to the dustbin, has latched on to the lucrative touchy-feely subject of animal emotions in such books as When Elephants Weep and Dogs Never Lie About Love. Brilliant books have been written on the topic, from Darwin's The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals to Donald R. Griffin's The Question of Animal Awareness, but this unintentionally
hilarious clip-job—in which Masson praises "heroic penguin fathers" and wrings his hands over the regrettable behavior of infanticidal papa bears and lions (which, he theorizes, just don't have enough "experience" being dads)—is not one. Masson promises that "I have not made anything up," but his book is riddled with errors: Penguins are said to
"live only south of the equator" when the Galapagos penguin lives on the equator; he also claims that "there are almost no direct observations of wolves," when the wolves of Lake Superior's Isle Royale have been studied since 1958. The Emperor's Embrace excels only in providing an intimate glimpse
into the mind of that all-too-common species: the best-selling nincompoop.
Fire on the Mountain: The True Story of the South Canyon Fire, by John N. Maclean (Morrow, $24). In 1992, Norman Maclean's posthumous Young Men and Fire—the hypnotically riveting account of the 1949 Mann Gulch fire in Montana that killed 13 smokejumpers—was hailed as a classic
anatomy of fire and its capacity to consume young lives in an instant. Maclean hoped to teach the lessons of Mann Gulch to future firefighters so that they might not die in canyon "blowups"—fires that, given the right mix of fuel, wind, and topography, suddenly reach explosive conditions. Now his son, a longtime reporter for the Chicago Tribune, has painstakingly reviewed those lessons. In 1994, 14 firefighters died on Colorado's Storm King Mountain in conditions almost identical to those in Mann Gulch. The deaths were undoubtedly preventable: Petty bureaucratic infighting stalled response time, allowing what started as a "twenty-five acre nothing," in the
words of one observer, to metamorphose into a monster that turned the air "orange-yellow, as though the sky itself had caught fire," fanning waves of lethal superheated gases before it. Less lyrical than his father, Maclean nonetheless shares his quiet outrage, and his thorough report could save lives if it receives the attention it deserves. —CAROLINE FRASER
