January 1982 RAIN Page 11 manac punch holes so you can hang it where it'll be handy. There is more information of a somewhat random nature in each little quick-read chunk than most books put across in far more formidable formats. Learn the secrets of giant vegetables, how to forecast the weather, who started some of my favorite rumors and even a lot more practical stuff. Standard almanac fare: sunrise and set times; lunar cycles, planting info, tide tables and fishing guides are all included, too. —CC Basin and Range, by John McPhee, 1980, 1981,216 pp., $10.95 hardcover, from: Farrar Straus Giroux 19 Union Square West New York, NY 10003 I was biased from the the start: John McPhee is one of my favorite writers, and I majored in geology at Princeton. McPhee writes about geology and Princeton geologists (his characterizations are right on mark!) and Nevada. Have you ever driven through Nevada? I did, fast, on my way to Portland. There's a bar every 100 miles, a jackrabbit every 100 yards, sagebrush between jackrabbits, salt flats, test ranges, gravel roads turning into the horizon with signs like "Cortez Gold Mines, 62 miles" or "Deadhorse Well, 31 miles." Why Nevada, of all places? McPhee wanted to learn how the New Geology was different from the Old Geology: "What I did first off was what anyone would do. I called my local geologist." His local geologist, Princeton professor Kenneth Deffeyes, told him that "This Nevada topography is what you see during mountain-building. This is the tectonic, active, spreading, mountainbuilding world." Basins and ranges are the "stretch marks of the continent." It's the cutting edge, it's where things are happening, and it's exciting. Geology is an adventure story, what with the geological time scales and encompassing "Big Picture" that have always entranced me, but not many geologists write as if it were. Deffeyes talks and McPhee writes that way. To McPhee, maps are "as prodigally colored as drip paintings and equally formless in their worm-trail-and-paramecium depictions of the country's uppermost rock." Like an alchemist, he absorbs the jargon of whatever subject he's writing about and turns it into enthusiasm. "Geologists communicated in English; and they could name things in a manner that sent shivers through the bones. They had roof pendants in their discordant batholiths, mosaic conglomerates in desert pavement." That's just his warmup exercise. This is the most exciting book I've read in a long time. You won't learn everything about geology, but what you don't learn here you'll certainly hunger for after tasting this book. (Re)discover the wonderfullness of geology. —TK BUILDING From Daily Planet Almanac Adobe: A Comprehensive Bibliography, by Rex C. Hopson, 1979,127 Pp., $6.95 plus $.50 shipping from: The Lightning Tree P.O. Box 1837 Santa Fe, NM 87501 Browse through the 1321 references in this book and you'll discover a long and varied history of building with earth. References are sorted into three categories: books, journal articles, and films/maps/plans. This list would be more useful if the citations were annotated or at least if the best sources were indicated. It is a comprehensive list, though, at least up to 1979. Particularly well-covered are articles from American Southwest periodicals. —TK Mud, mud-the potential of earth-based materialfor Third World housing, by Anil Agarwal, 1981,100 pp., $6.25 from: Earthscan 10 Percy Street London WIP ODR United Kingdom Tubali, torchis, soddys, cajon, kacha, nog- ging, cob, adobe, teroni, swish, bauge, chi- ka, pise, jalous, tapia, wattle and daub, and mud are some of the words used to describe the use of earth for building. Gounberilles, bustees, jhuggis, callampas, gecekindu, and favelas are some names for slums or squatter settlements, where about a quarter of urban Third World populations live. This book is about the potential of earth- based materials for Third World housing. Like a Borges story, the length of the piece belies its contents: not one muddy sentence or spare word. It is a solid, clear, concise, and comprehensive account with chapters on the housing problem, building materials, the case for mud, and country surveys—examples of mud buildings around the world (including a Detroit cooperative formed in 1942 to make rammed earth houses!). Tm tempted to use jargon to describe the book. Agarwal gives examples of poor people preferring a high-status but substandard cement block tin-roofed house to a lower status but high quality mud house. Tm tempted to call this the "gray revolution"— the introduction of a piece of American or European technology with no regard for local climate, needs, or resources. Echoing the thoughts of most architects and planners, Hassan Fathy realized that "we, with our modern school-learned ideas, never dreamed of using such a ludicrous substance as mud for so serious a creation as a house." (Fathy, an Egyptian architect, wrote Architecture for the Poor—reviewed in RAIN 1:9.) And what could be more appropriate technology than building with mud? Not only is it cheap and readily available, but mud houses are cooler in summer and warmer in winter than concrete houses. Various indigenous architectures have evolved to cope with the idiosyncracies of mud: vaulted roofs instead of unstable flat roofs, additions of other materials to stabilize and waterproof the mud, overhanging eaves to prevent water erosion, platforms of baked bricks to eliminate water seepage from the ground. Without architects, most societies have created beautifully designed and crafted forms of shelter suited to the bioregion and the needs of the people. (Five and six-story houses are made out of mud in Yemen!) Agarwal also advocates self-help, quoting Fathy: "One man cannot build a house, but 10 men can build 10 houses." Facts presented honestly, in a soft voice, have real power. We read of a housing project that, because of bureaucratic delays, doubled the cost of houses being built cooperatively—from $150 to $300. Our cdnr cern over rising housing costs pales in the face of statistics on housing costs in other parts of the world. In Madras, for example, 63% of the households can't afford to buy a $570 dwelling (average cost) because they don't make the minimum monthly income of $36 required to repay the $5 due each month on the house. My own book-lined garret feels extravagant compared to what most of the people in the world live in. Read this book not for any "romantic notion about earth buildings or about living in harmony with nature," but for excellent information on the potential of mud for basic shelter and for insights into how people live in the rest of the world—a good lesson in cultural relativism. Put it on your bookshelf next to Food First; it's that good. Highly recommended. —TK
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTc4NTAz