Tides by Jonathan White ****

Tides by Jonathan White is a combination of travelogue, anthropology, and science. Each of the nine chapters starts with a topic and/or a place and presents the science, history, sociology etc. with an emphasis on tides. The book opens with the Bay of Fundy,  and moves to Mont Saint-Michel and China. After a digression for Sir Isaac Newton, it proceeds to surfing, geophysics, and resonance. The book closes with energy and climate change.

When the author marveled at the "clean plate" regime of his Chinese guide...

"She [told him] that when she was a child and didn't finish all her food..her mother threatened to make her eat American food for a week."

"The oldest [Ming Dynasty 1368-1644] dike still serving its purpose is the fish-scale dike...of hewn stone bonded together with a mixture of sand, lime, and boiled rice...Mortar did not replace boiled rice as a bonding agent until 1940."

I found the explanation for lunar tides excellent. The moon does not cause high tides by raising the water under the moon. Rather, the moon attracts the water that flows horizontally across the earth's surface toward the moon. This mass of water rolling toward the moon causes water to pile up under the moon resulting in high tides.

An interesting anthropological observation: in a community where the people were served by both traditional healers and western medical doctors, the author met a lady convinced that her illness was caused by voodoo. The author questioned her as to why she still took the western medications. She replied (through a translator), "Honey, are you incapable of complexity?" [rim shot]

Some edit/design issues of this book from Trinity University Press.

The maps used a grey background for water and white for land. I found this confusing, mixing up the land and the water. Just to compound the confusion, most maps had an inset where the convention was reversed, making the land dark and the water light.

In a tutorial paragraph on frequency, Radio and TV frequencies were off by three orders-of-magnitude, middle C was off by 3%, hummingbirds and earthquakes off by a factor of 2-4, and the tutorial was concluded with this non-sequitur: "All these are high-frequency vibrations."

Whether your interest is world travel, physics, or anthropology, you'll find this book interesting, though depending on your interests, you might find yourself skimming over some sections.