48 | NewScientist | 9 July 2011

CULTURELAB

uneven sex ratios and mass social unrest. Although it’s true that millions of bachelors who can’t find wives might drive up crime figures, there isn’t really enough evidence that this will spark testosterone-fuelled wars or some kind of societal breakdown in quite the ways she suggests. The reality isn’t so bleak. Indeed, there is some comfort to be drawn from the fact that South Korea, which once had a depressingly poor birth ratio of 117 boys to every 100 girls, has returned to a near-even balance now that the country is wealthier and more women are entering the workplace.

Economic development does appear to help. But the story doesn’t end there – advances in genetics may allow the wealthiest among us to select for desirable traits in the future, such as height, good looks or intelligence. For parents who think this might be a good idea, Hvistendahl’s book beautifully explains how trying to conceive the “perfect” child will only lead to a more imperfect world.

Angela Saini is the author of Geek Nation: How Indian science is taking over the world

No girls allowedWhen a culture prizes baby boys over girls, the result can be a dangerously lopsided world

infanticide, but also in tougher lives for women in regions where they are outnumbered. Rather than scarcity making them more valued, they increasingly fall victim to trafficking, kidnap and forced marriage.

Much of the book is also devoted to the part played – mostly inadvertently – by the west. She argues that US policies to control population growth in Asia in the 1970s and 1980s, aggressively implemented by organisations like the World Bank, created an abortion boom that exacerbated the problem. By 1977 in Seoul, for example, doctors were performing a record 2.75 abortions for every birth, partly because couples choosing to have smaller families wanted only boys.

Hvistendahl is slightly less convincing, though, when she starts drawing parallels between

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Unnatural Selection: Choosing boys over girls and the consequences of a world full of men by Mara Hvistendahl, PublicAffairs, £17.99/$26.99

Reviewed by Angela Saini

IN SOME places, there’s no greater danger to a baby girl than her own parents. For decades now, in swathes of Asia and pockets of

eastern Europe, millions of female fetuses have been aborted and infants murdered for no other reason than their families wanted boys. In Unnatural Selection, science journalist Mara Hvistendahl explores the scale of this shocking phenomenon and questions why it exists.

It’s a gripping read. Expensive dowries, honour and maintaining the family name are the main drivers behind the increasingly skewed sex ratios, but Hvistendahl makes clear that these factors alone don’t capture the complex cultural and social environment that has created such a huge problem. It’s so widespread, she writes, that by 2013 there will be six Chinese men for every five Chinese women. And the same will be true in parts of India by the 2020s. She meticulously unpicks the alarming statistics in other countries too, from South Korea as far west as Albania and Armenia.

Coming from a family of sisters with our roots in India, as I do, Hvistendahl’s book was a particularly disturbing read. At every stop in her journey she comes across entrenched sexism and violence against women, manifesting itself not only in

Moon rock lunacy Sex on the Moon: The amazing story behind the most audacious heist in history by Ben Mezrich, William Heinemann/Doubleday, £11.99/$26.95

Reviewed by Jonathon Keats

RETURNING from vacation in the summer of 2002, NASA geochemist Dr Everett Gibson learned that a 275-kilogram safe had vanished from

Early days of GoogleI’m Feeling Lucky: The confessions of Google employee number 59 by Douglas Edwards, Allen Lane/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, £20/$27

Reviewed by Andrew Keen

“ONCE you are lucky, twice you are good.” So goes the old cliché about success in Silicon Valley. But Douglas Edwards, an early employee

at Google, admits he was just lucky. Joining the then inchoate search company in 1999 as its first marketing executive, Edwards hit what he calls “the startup jackpot”. Indeed, he became so wealthy that, as he reveals with the self-effacement characteristic to his writing, he could afford to buy his favourite luxury ice cream even when it wasn’t on offer.

“I was not a Young Turk,” writes Edwards – who had run online marketing for his local newspaper before joining Google – about his business prowess. Nor does he write like someone with a Young Turk’s drive for radical change. Yet his tone is affectionate enough to make I’m Feeling Lucky an enjoyable account of the struggles a creative marketing guy faced in the early days of Google, when the company was run by geeks with a messianic faith in “Efficiency, Frugality, Integrity”.

9 July 2011 | NewScientist | 49

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Caught in the swampSwamplife by laura ogden, University of minnesota press, £17/$22.50

Reviewed by Cian O’Luanaigh

VENOMOUS snakes, outlaws and 5-metre alligators are the meat of Laura Ogden’s account of life in the Florida Everglades.

Ogden, associate professor of anthropology at Florida International University, has spent the last 10 years interviewing the “gladesmen” who lived and hunted in this vast swamp in decades gone by. In Swamplife, she recounts their close association with a landscape in constant flux – in which hunters become poachers, swamps become shopping malls, and alligators become handbags.

For decades, gladesmen supplemented their income by hunting alligators for their hides. Ogden gives a fascinating account of the tricks they used to capture and sell the reptilian prize.

Bigger hides fetched a higher price, so hunters would stretch skins before trying to sell them, but this caused a telltale separation in the scales. It wasn’t

just the hides that were sold: alligator fat was used as soap during the American civil war, and teeth made popular jewellery at the end of the 19th century.

Ogden recounts some colourful stories of encounters with the Everglades’ reptiles. One naturalist’s narrow escape from a 4.5-metre snake gives a real feel for what was described by Lieutenant Hugh Willoughby in 1897 as the “snakiest” place he had ever seen.

The inhospitable nature of the landscape had its benefits for some though. The then notorious Ashley gang, who terrorised the region in the 1910s and 20s, used it as a hideout. Ogden tells of the gang’s numerous escapes from jail, their illegal rum running, and their seeming ineptitude in the face of danger – gang member Kid Low accidentally shot John Ashley in the face during a bank robbery, for example, leaving Ashley with a glass eye.

These lighter stories are interspersed with more academic sections, a reminder of Ogden’s ethnographic background. Throughout the book she repeatedly returns to a metaphor of a rhizome, arguing that the history, geography and inhabitants of the area are all connected, like sproutings from an underground stem. The metaphor is apt, but the transition from historical narrative to ethnographic analysis can feel clunky.

Nevertheless, Ogden’s rhizome metaphor highlights a now- lost connection between the gladesmen and nature. Nowadays, large-scale drainage projects have transformed the Florida landscape. One-time alligator hunters stuff bags in the state’s supermarkets. This is good news for the alligators: since the Endangered Species Act was passed in 1973, numbers have increased so much they are now managed under Florida’s nuisance alligator programme. Still, Ogden’s touching tales from the Everglades leave you nostalgic for a lifestyle irrevocably lost.

Misguided mooning: stealing lunar rocks is no recipe for love

his lab. Situated in one of the most secure buildings on the planet, the lab was an implausible target for even the world’s greatest crime syndicates – despite the fact that the Apollo lunar samples were stored there and the street price of moon rocks was estimated at about $5 million per gram.

The theft of the safe, which contained 101.5 grams of material, including samples from every lunar landing, was in fact stranger and more pedestrian than anyone could have imagined. Late one night, three NASA interns wheeled the safe into a borrowed Jeep, planning to hawk the material to a Belgian buyer they had found online. Within days they were caught, turned in by the Belgian and arrested in an FBI sting.

After serving a six-year prison sentence, Thad Roberts – the “mastermind” of this unmasterly crime – called Ben Mezrich, bestselling author of The Accidental Billionaires, seeking to reveal his side of the

story. Trumped up by Mezrich as “one of the biggest heists in US history”, Sex on the Moon is the entertaining yet unsatisfying result of that collaboration.

Mezrich relates Roberts’s life as a thriller. Cast out by his Mormon family for premarital sex, Roberts finds direction by resolving to become an astronaut. He studies hard and lands a coveted internship at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, where he impresses fellow interns with pranks such as sneaking into the space shuttle simulator. In his third semester, he falls in love with a new intern. “I want to give you the moon,” he tells her.

So far, so clichéd. Yet Roberts has trouble in the Romeo role. He seems less interested in giving

her the moon than in selling it – or as much of it as he can get – for an improbably low $100,000, which he persuades her will provide them with the opportunity “to be scientists”. Apparently she falls for it.

“Apparently” is the key word here. Neither she nor the third intern involved in the heist would talk to Mezrich. Without their perspectives, the book is as superficial as Roberts. Even if Roberts’s riveting depiction of events is accurate – hardly certain since he has previously given different versions to other journalists – Sex on the Moon has neither the investigative breadth nor the literary depth needed to elucidate the motivations underlying the self-destruction of three promising careers.

Nor are the consequences of the heist adequately explored. In the same safe as the moon rocks were Gibson’s notebooks, containing 20 years of research, permanently lost when the cracked safe was dumped. Roberts doesn’t remember seeing them, and Mezrich nearly ignores them because they don’t fit his story arc. But in a tale about value – and values – the fate of Gibson’s notes speaks volumes: the true worth of those rocks is to be found in the research they generate.

“The theft of the safe was in fact stranger and more pedestrian than anyone could have imagined”