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Show D4 TheSalt Lake Tribune BOOKS ‘Venice Againstthe Sea’: A Rising Tide of Woe John Keahey is an admirably dispassionate chronicler of the intensely heated controversy over Venice’s fate. Heis clearly animated by a great love for the city, but he also possesses a healthy skepticism about the deeply politicized state of the debate, and an infectious curiosity about how all things Venetian work. Tribunereporter documents sad neglectofItalian city beneath the city for industrial development; the neglect of the city’s canals, building walls and generalinfrastructure since World WarII (to this day, Venice has no modern sewage system,relying on the lagoon’s high andlowtides to flushits wastewaterout to sea). The most potent source of Venice’s sogginess is also the one over which Venetians have theleast control: the rise of sea Venice Against the Sea: A City Besieged By John Keahey; 296 pages; $25.95; St. Martin's Press BYCHRIS LEHMANN All empires areultimately destinedtobe his- tory’s flotsam, but Venice seems poised to make this much morethan metaphoric prophecy-speak. The North Adri arose onalder poles well over a except that by someestimates, the world today is “onlyfive to nine degrees warmer” than it was during the Ice Age. Andas the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has concluded, the plains at the outset, Venice is, in geographical terms, a quite literal freak of nature. “A lagoon is theoretically a transitional phase in the building up, or breaking down, of thingsterrestrial,” he millenniumago is risingsteadily, and Venice's once rare high wa ters are becoming peratures seem to be rising at a quickerrate.” This may not seem like such a dramatic shift — done to stem thetide. As he ex- Peso sa atic lagoon over which the city almost petrified with each passing century.” This ingenious balancing act has kept Venice afloat for centuries. It’s only with the recent rise of the surrounding seas that so much of Venice has become so regularly waterlogged. Keahey reports that “the Earth's temperature increased by at least 1.1 degree Fahrenheit over thelast century. Within the last twenty-five years, tem- levels in response to global warming. In Venice Against the Sea, journalist John Keahey, a reporter for The Salt Lake Tribune, describes the remarkable architectural history that unwittingly placed the once-noble republic in its current plight, and surveys the bitter present-day political disputes over what can be THE WASHINGTON POST extremely commonplace. Flood tides of last century’s warming has produced a “rate of sea-level rise about ten times greater than the averagerate overthelast 3,000 years.” But the global, inevitable sweep of a hotter climateis just one of Venice’s problems.It is also writes. “If left undisturbed over a relatively short period of time, a lagoon becomes either land or more than 31 inches inundated 99 occasions in 1996; ieral recent annual sea. saddled with the task of formulating somestrat- The artificial restraints egy ofcivicflood protection in a postwar Italian polity that is all but allergic to long-term planning of any kind. Keaheyis an admirably dispassionate chronicler of the intensely heated controversy over Venice's fate. He is clearly animated by a great love for the city, but he also possesses a healthy skepticism about the deeply politicized state of the debate, and an infectious curiosity about howall things Venetian work. Asa result, ardent preservationists will find precious little conso- early Venetians built into their lagoon have fought this natural cycle until this very d: still enough so that most of the city’s inhabitants of ground-floor Jences have movedeither up or out. The city’s Piazza San Marco, whichfloods at a 27-inch tide, was deluged only seven times in 1900, and20 times a year throughout the 1950s. Over the Indeed, what has been remarkable about Venice's defianceof nature’s course is thatit hasbeen so successful for so long: By laying the foundations of Venice on wooden pilings, the city’s fathers actually placed it on a layer of exceptionally solid earth beneath the lagoon’s sediments; the water surroundingthe poles encased them in a vacuum that worked to steady them further; and the alder “became stronger — 1970s, it flooded 1,013 times. Thegreater frequency, and deeper volume, of flooding has a number of cat theill-advised dredging of the lagoon to deepen shipping lanes for oil tankers; the pumping of the groundwater Sunday, June 30, 2002 lation in this smoothly written, cautionary account of the far-ranging worldly forces that are pushingoneofthe world’s most magnificentcities everfarther belowsea level. ‘Ghost’Is a Gripping Story of Extinction, Hunting, Hoping corporation. But he just as happily joins the lunatic fringe to explore the search for “cryptobeasts” like the Sasquatch and Loch Ness monster. ‘The Ghost With Trembling Wings By Scott Weidensaul; North Point on Tasmania). Yet a proposal to revivify the thylacine by using DNA from tissues preserved in laboratories has set off a scientific brouhaha, with somehailing the project as a wondrousscientific quest and others calling it a carnival And underlying the marvelous writing and fabulouscreatures are some hard moral andsci- Press; $26 sideshowthat drains limited funds from efforts entific questions, like, how did we drive somany living things to extinction? Why do we continue BY ERIC SHARP to Scott Weidensaul’s Living on the Wind was a if we could recreate these animals, should we? Pulitzer Prizefinalist for nonfiction in 1999, a remarkable achievement for a book whose sub- endangered If you want to read a portion of Weidensaul's book that explores these ethical issues, see the piece in the latest Audubon magazine that he adapted from his chapter on the thylacine, an Australian critter that wasalso called the marThelast one died inan Australian 20070years. ago (although somepeople still report sightings % Colony, by Lee Miller (Penguin, $15, paper- back): It’s long been one of history’s great mysteries. What happened to the 116 settlers on North Carolina’s RoanokeIsland, who inexplicably disappeared between 1587 and 1590? Did they die of starvation or disease? Were they caj iptured and killed by the Powhatan Indians of Virginia? Did they dis-perse inland? As historian Miller examinesthe clues, separating myth from fact, she begins to unravel a complexscenario. She finds evidence that Jamestown investigators never disclosed to the public; she follows maps, names, journals, Indian trading paths and, most intriguing of all, an enameled China box. Woman ofIndependence Martha Peake: A Novelof the Revolution, * by Patrick McGrath (Vintage, $14.95): Good historical fiction often can conveytruths of a given era. Here, in a masterful Gothictale, McGrathrelates the spellbinding tale of the daughter of a strange, deformed smuggler whoflees Londonto colonial America, where she becomes caught up in the revolution against England. Readers hear herstory from young Ambrose Tree, who hearsit from his dying uncle at Drogo Hall, where an aged hunchbackwaits in the wings. . . Turning Point April 1865: The Month That Saved America, by Jay Winik (HarperPerennial, $14.95, paperback): Richmond fell, Lee retreated, Appomattox ended the Civil War — and then Lincoln was assassinated. No one can argue with the significanceof events of April 1865, buthistorian Winik amply demonstratesjust how important the month wasin shaping the future of the United States. As he chronicles the events and profiles the leaders on both sides, he considers alternatives. Whatif the Confederates, instead of surrendering, had. embarked on a prolonged guerilla war? What if Lincoln’s death had prompted a govern- mental coup? As it was, things changed, North and South, as the country became a nation that would profoundly influence world events. “Amid the wreckage of war, a kindofuniversal joint had been shifted, creating oneof those rare seismicjolts that history rarely notes more than once a century or even once a millennium.” Mail Call dencefrom America’s Wars, edited by Andrew Carroll (Washington Square Press, $16, paperback): “Dear Father and Mother,” wrote Lt. Lewis Plush in 1918, “Now thatit is all over, what is there to look back upon? The fifteen months in France have been like a book with strange chapters, a book that one reads and casts aside as impossible, but a book that leavesa lasting grip on the imagination.” Similarly, this collection’s nearly 200 letters impress, whether written by a soldier in a foxhole or Clara Barton at Fredricksburg. 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TICKETSONSALENOW! ‘ShowTimes: rida, Judy 29th 7:30pm ‘Seturiay, Ay 20th 7:30pm i Evening Entertainment con from Roanoke: Solving the Mystery of the Lost War Letters: Extraordinary Correspon- writes about mainstream efforts, like the recent hunt for the ivory-billed woodpecker in Louisiana, an expedition run by eminent ornithologists and financed by a multi-national species Weidensaul also documents his personal search for a “ghost with trembling wings,” a hunt he admits might be as chimerical as the search for Nessie. He makes trips to South America looking for the cone-billed tanager, a bird known from one specimen collected in 1930 and never seen again. And he admits that he will never stop searching, because he knowsthe lesson that all of us can learn from his quest to understandthe long gone, soon to be gone and maybe neverwere: It’s the hope and the hunt that count the most. stop them? Have we developed the technical skills to recreate extinct animals by backbreeding orcloning with ancient DNA? And even ject bird migration would seem an unlikely candidate for that kind of popular acclaim. Now Weidensaul returnswith Th Trembling Wings, an even morefas ploration of the mysteries of the extinction, occasionalrediscovery andpotential scientific reincarnationof long-vanished animals. Ghostis really a kind of quirky work, as evi denced byits subtitle, Science, Wishful Thinking, and the Search for Lost Species. Weidensaul other extinction. to let so manyextinctions happen when wecould KNIGHTRIDDER NEWS SERVICE save THE ORLANDO SENTINEL SEI Missing Persons 9pm - Synergy, MusicalTribute to the American Spirit 10 pm - Fireworks Daytime . « Finallyl! Good old fashioned Rock n’"Roll at it's best for one night only! 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