I recently discovered one of the most thrilling – and terrifying – parts of book publishing: reading the reviews.
Usually they contain thoughtful insights about the thing you sweated over for years. Occasionally, you wonder what the reviewer was smoking. Rarer still, a reviewer really gets it, making you want to stand up and shout: “That’s why I did this!”
The latter feeling came over me after reading a review of my nonfiction book, Gold Rush in the Jungle, by Christie Wilcox of Discover magazine. She said it made her cry in public.
Some background: The book is about how the discovery of rare, unusual wildlife in Indochina created a ‘biological gold rush,’ drawing everyone from biologists to black marketeers. The result is that Vietnam’s fauna and flora have never been more vulnerable. Ironically, Vietnamese biologists say “the peace is more dangerous than war” when it comes to protecting their country’s natural heritage.
A biologist herself, what Wilcox liked most was how the book examines the passion that makes researchers study, fight for, and rescue extremely rare, new-found mammals — “what drove me to become a biologist in the first place,” she wrote.
“The fragile and emotional side of biologists is exactly what society needs to see . . . Too often, scientists are seen as egotistical misanthropes, but as one of them, I know better. I have felt the pain of loss that Drollette depicts as botanist Steve Perlman explains that when a rare plant dies, he thinks ‘Yeah, I’m not coming here again. I’ll go out and get drunk or something, because I’ve just lost a friend.’ I empathize with Alan Rabinowitz’s account of how, when he was young, animals helped him overcome stuttering, as my own pets and the natural world around me as a child were my way of coping with a broken home and a tough social situation at school. People that go into science, especially conservation biology, usually do so from a very passionate place . . .”
This was a stark reminder to a popular science writer. It’s easy to fall into reciting dates and findings. Instead, we need to show the adventure of the process of science – depicting the blood, sweat, sorrows, and joys of fieldwork.
In publishing, they call this: “Show, don’t tell.”
Unfortunately, researchers hate this – I found it telling to discover while working in Europe that the French word for translating academic research into everyday language is “vulgarization.”
Ugh.
But everyday readers do identify with the labors of other human beings, and like to participate vicariously. In a budget-conscious era, the more the public appreciates researchers’ work, the more willing they are to spend tax dollars to fund research.
We need to put flesh on dry statistics and explain why, for example, a biologist would leave his home to start up a new life in a developing country and save an animal few have heard of.
Understand, the story is NOT an ego trip about us journalists ‘daring’ to go into the field. Instead, it’s about using every journalistic tool we have to show why researchers dodge landmines, endure bouts with tropical disease, rappell down cliffs, and wrestle with communist authorities to do their work.
It’s about connecting the dots between raw fieldwork and dry abstract. It’s about science’s human side.
It’s about passion.
It’s about showing, not telling.