Customer Reviews

The Ice Finders: How a Poet, a Professor, and a Politician Discovered the Ice Age

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The history of science and the origins of our contemporary biases are so rarely explored that it was a pleasure to discover Bolles' The Ice Finders. It is quite entertaining in its exposition of the lives of three individuals and their separate, but intertwined, paths to the "discovery" of the Ice Age theory. It is a highly readable, non-technical book, with enough information to nudge someone with a greater interest towards more detailed, sophisticated reading, much like a good magazine article might do. There is at least one startling factual error that should be addressed, however. In a brief passage, the author introduces a supporting figure, Charles-Lucien Bonaparte, patron of Louis Agassiz and a well-known naturalist in his own right. Bonaparte is erroneously identified as Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte's brother. Charles-Lucien was Napoleon's nephew. Although seemingly a minor point, Charles-Lucien is well-known enough that basic research and fact-checking should have caught the error (for further reference see Patricia T. Stroud's excellent and thorough The Emperor of Nature). It made me wonder whether any of the other facts Bolles musters, and with which I am not as familiar, are also wrong. With that in mind, I would still recommend the book for a novel perspective on how scientific minds work, and for a glimpse into the lives of three fascinating individuals.

A very good read but suffers - in my opinion - from a lack of more detailed maps. A few plates would have livened it up somewhat as well. It parallels the "discovery" of continental drift a hundred years later.

This is a wonderful little book about three individuals deeply involved in the exploration and discovery of the earth and it's origins during the 19th century - Louis Agassiz a Swiss Professor and politician; Elsisha Kent Kane, who spent two years trapped in the ice of Greenland and published "Arctic Exporations," his account of the ordeal; and Charles Lyell, a Scottish Geologist.

Bolles interweaves each figure's story and experiences as they work their way toward the discovery and acceptance of the previous Ice Ages and how they explain many argued about features of earth, such as erractic boulders and glacial moraines - many of which were accepted as the outcome of biblical events. And these primary explainations were a major hurdle to our ever-expanding understand of the earth, it's origins as ours.

The names of these three individuals will probably be familar to any reader of Arctic Exploration, Discovery and History.