American trait

Author: Jack Hitt

Gungywamp was sought out and placed in history by an amateur.

The author began the book with Ben Franklin and ended with it. Towards the end we are introduced to Claude-Anne Lopez. Her life story summary is interesting enough that we don’t ask why we need to know about her until we recall after few pages that the lady we just read of is a biographer of Franklin. The author is skilled at story telling.

There is a conflict in the book between trying to be exhaustive about a topic – rare birdwatching, race, skywatching and not to forget that all this has to be viewed with the lens of amateurism. The subtitle ‘a search for the American character’ is a catchall for the variety of the book. For the amazing content, I can overlook the ‘the case of curious title’ as miscataloging (who would have thunk that there’s no need of a u).

The first chapter looks at Franklin Vs John Adams that goes like Frederick Vs Voltaire each at odds with the others behavior. When I caught sight of ‘Ivory bill’, I couldn’t brace myself to read about it.  When there is a talk of this bird, fuzzy is not far. It is not clear if this bird is alive or not. The proof is a grainy video which has been questioned by many amateurs. In each chapter the author talks of the reigning theories and the dents made in them by amateurs.

The book is result of Immersive journalism. Where the author follows amateurs – birdwatchers in chase of ivory bill, extracting DNA using cleverly rigged gadgets instead of the expensive equipment used in lab, astronomers in search of a good ‘seeing’ and making lenses with them.

In the race chapter, the author questions flimsy claims and has a paragraph that lists all the biases that we could be prone to while analyzing data. Kennewick man is shown as one such multi-biased case and an example of how floating symbols can be weaved into different cultures to support their ‘manifest destinies’.

Amateurism is not only about clever individuals but collaboration among many of them on a scale made possible by the today’s ‘open-source’ – bioweather maps, Galaxy zoo.

The author has a way of keeping a thread running among the chapters – the power of myth in the Gungywampers case, Native American origin tale involving ice, the myth of Ivory Bill’s continued existence. That said there are some leaps in the narrative that we can overlook for the book’s far reach.

To live in a world where another discovery changes our history, but do we all recalibrate ourselves with that new knowledge? Before I heard of the Clovis, I thought that America was very young and with the pre-Clovis and a harmless T-rex, I can imagine a story with a T-rex in an unlikely friendship with another animal but with the man, we will probably keep looking for an evidence that explains all the migrations of the Neanderthal man or we’ll just look up to the sky until we meet our future – ET.

Hail the people with DIY in their genes!