Review of reviews:?Books

Book of the week

Gusher of Lies: The Dangerous Delusions of ‘Energy Independence’

by Robert Bryce

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(PublicAffairs, $27)

More than nine out of 10 Americans agree that “energy independence” is a goal worth seeking. Presidents have been telling us as much since Nixon, and current worries that oil money is funding terrorism have added urgency to the mission. But journalist Robert Bryce thinks our national obsession with producing energy at home is ludicrous. “From nearly any standpoint—economic, military, political, or environmental—energy independence makes no sense,” he writes. Bryce doesn’t believe that any alternative energy is capable of making a serious dent in the U.S. appetite for fossil fuels over the next 30 to 50 years. Even if such alternatives did exist, he says, withdrawing from the global energy market would be as counterproductive as swearing off imports of cars, bananas, or semiconductors.

Bryce proves to be an “equal-opportunity” debunker, said William Grimes in The New York Times. Gusher of Lies is the work of a man who’s as fed up with environmentalists’ pipe dreams as he is with “neocon” foreign policy, and he goes after his targets “with all the gusto of a hunter clubbing baby seals.” He’s none too sanguine about solar and wind power, but ethanol, in particular, “drives him wild.” Ethanol made from corn emits more pollutants than gasoline, he says, while ethanol made from switch grass couldn’t satisfy our fuel needs unless we established a monoculture across an area three times the size of Texas. Only algae-based biofuels and “super” batteries seem to count in Bryce’s mind as promising developing technologies.

Bryce also makes a convincing case against the popular notion that U.S. oil money is funding terrorism worldwide, said Kenneth P. Green in the New York Post. Mexico and Canada are two of our top three oil suppliers, after all, and most insurgent groups are financed not by oil but by drug and human trafficking, the weapons trade, and other criminal activities. Equally specious is the idea that the U.S. wouldn’t be in Iraq but for our oil addiction. Other nations are at least as reliant on Middle Eastern oil, and the world economy would collapse if they lost access to it. Most readers won’t agree with Bryce on every detail of his argument, said Laura Vanderkam in The American, but with Gusher of Lies, he’s supplied “a strong and much-needed dose of reality.” Better still, he makes it all entertaining.

Jumbo: The Greatest Elephant in the World

by Paul Chambers

(Steerforth, $24)

The next time you ride on a jumbo jet or guzzle a jumbo-size Coke, spare a thought for the African bull elephant that gave gigantism a fun name. Born near Sudan around 1860, Jumbo the elephant was a runt not expected to live long by the hunters who sold him into French captivity. But after a brief career in Paris, he was purchased by the London Zoo and nursed to robust health by a devoted keeper. Patient with children and partial to whiskey, Jumbo was already the world’s most famous pachyderm when the Barnum and Bailey circus brought him to America in 1882. Three years later, he was struck by a train in an Ontario rail yard. The circus said he was trying to protect a smaller elephant when the fatal accident occurred.

From “impoverished childhood” to “posthumous exploitation,” Jumbo endured a journey that could be “the stuff of an E! True Hollywood Story,” said Gary Susman in Entertainment Weekly. Even though author Paul Chambers fails to fully explain how Jumbo became so famous, his slim new book “does a remarkable job” of re-creating the elephant’s strange world and bringing his human handlers to life. Some of the most touching passages in this “gentle, well-wrought book” concern Jumbo’s “marriage” to a younger elephant named Alice, said Carol Herman in The Washington Times. Alice apparently put up with Jumbo’s occasional drinking, and Chambers’ descriptions of the couple’s bonding give this bittersweet tale a warm heart.

P.T. Barnum squeezed every cent he could out of his investment in Jumbo, said James Sullivan in The Boston Globe. Barnum duped the public into believing that Jumbo was the largest mammal in captivity, and he probably manufactured the heroic details about the animal’s demise. Barnum eventually shipped Jumbo’s skeleton to his American Museum in New York and used the animal’s mounted hide as the centerpiece of the Barnum Museum of Natural History at Tufts University. Though a 1975 fire destroyed most of stuffed Jumbo, his tail escaped: Visitors had made such a tradition of tugging the tail for luck that it had broken off years before. Today it resides “in an old Peter Pan Crunchy Peanut Butter jar” in the office of the university’s athletic director.