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Science Can Be Spun
Trust Us, We're Experts: How Industry Manipulates Science and Gambles With Your Future, by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber, Tarcher/Putnam, $24.95; $14.95 paper

This exposé of corporate spin strategies rips away the veil of big business's manipulation of public opinion, detailing how companies use the creative talents and resources of public-relations firms to mask their troubling practices. If, for example, a company has a toxic-waste spill or a poisonous product, its image guardians call in the PR pros to promote a cheap solution to the problem. If that doesn't do the trick, it can unleash the experts who claim that critics of corporations use "junk science." "The best PR ends up looking like news," one spin doctor tells the authors. "When a PR agency is being effective, you'll just find your views shifting."

But the "experts" that companies want us to trust are often scientists and organizations funded by the companies themselves.

After ten years of tracking the PR industry for the nonprofit Center for Media and Democracy, the authors document case after case in which authorities-for-hire have trumped the public good. One front group for the coal industry-the Greening Earth Society-claims the planet is growing lusher and healthier from coal's carbon dioxide emissions. (The same association created a bogus grassroots Web site that generated 20,000 e-mails to Congress opposing the Kyoto global-warming treaty.) Other industry front groups with appealing names-such as the pro-biotech Alliance for Better Foods-also hire scientific experts to parlay the corporate message.

As background, the authors serve up a fine history of manipulation, beginning in the 1920s with the Father of Spin, Edward Bernays. This psychological genius hired celebrities, athletes, and other prestigious people to promote bacon as a breakfast food and bananas as a cure for digestive disorders. His method of persuasion, dubbed the "third-party technique," also used testimonials from doctors and opera singers to promote smoking.

The tobacco industry perfected the manipulation of science, going so far as to ghostwrite medical articles discounting secondhand smoke's health effects. "If Oscars were given for such campaigns, tobacco would certainly win a lifetime-achievement award," Stauber and Rampton write. Not content with their own unmasking of corporate spin, Stauber and Rampton invite readers to join them, concluding with a list of resources and "Question Authority," a chapter on how to recognize and challenge propaganda.
--Will Fantle

Redwood Readers
A fine new set of books on redwoods includes photographic introductions, lyrical praise by major authors, the history of timber exploitation and efforts to spare the giant trees, and detailed prescriptions for managing what remains (less than 4 percent of the old-growth forest).

• Coast Redwood: A Natural and Cultural History, by Michael Barbour, Sandy Lydon, Mark Borchert, Marjorie Popper, Valerie Whitworth, and John Evarts (Cachuma Press, $27.95), not only showcases the trees, but in more than 200 color photos reveals the immense diversity of plants and animals of the forest. Hoary bats, bugling elks, rough-skinned newts, lungless salamanders, and even predaceous centipedes get equal billing with the famed spotted owl-in pictures by such eminent nature photographers as Frank Balthis, Michael Sewell, and Larry Ulrich. A comprehensive collection of photos and essays also covers the longtime efforts to preserve the redwoods-and the logging operations that mowed down so much woods in the first place.

• Giants in the Earth: The California Redwoods, edited by Peter Johnstone (Heyday Books, $l8), gathers together a host of great writers who have exulted in the towering trees: John Muir, Jack London, Arthur Conan Doyle, Robinson Jeffers, Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, Tom Wolfe, and Czeslaw Milosz. There's even Walt Whitman, exulting and mourning simultaneously:

I heard the mighty tree its death-chant chanting
The choppers heard not, the camp
shanties echoed not . . .
But in my soul I plainly heard.
Murmuring out of its myriad leaves
Down from its lofty top rising two
hundred feet high,
Out of its stalwart trunk and limbs,
out of its foot-thick bark,
That chant of the seasons and time, chant
not of the past only but the future.

• Forest Giants of the Pacific Coast, by Robert Van Pelt (Global Forest Society/University of Washington Press, $35), leads off with the giant sequoia and the coastal redwood, but then concisely describes and discusses l8 other western giants, among them the Jeffrey pine, western hemlock, and yellow cedar. The book provides detailed illustrations and maps of the species' range; instructions for measuring trees; and a list of the dimensions of the biggest ones of their kind, the champion trees.

• The Redwood Forest: History, Ecology, and Conservation of the Coast Redwoods, edited by Reed F. Noss (Island Press, $30), is a collection of scientific essays. Written with the blessing of the Save-the-Redwoods League, this is a mine of information for activists and forest managers directly involved in protecting redwoods, but should also be of interest to tree-huggers who hunger for more in-depth knowledge about forest ecology.
--Bob Schildgen

At a glance
Rivers of Life: Southwest Alaska, the Last Great Salmon Fishery Photographs by Robert Glenn Ketchum; essay by Bruce Hampton Aperture $50

Salmon created this landscape: For thousands of years, swimming upstream by the millions, they have been food for grizzly and others, ultimately fertilizing the very ground from which their rivers flow. This magnificent volume explains such exuberant biology of salmon country while reveling in its beauty-and wondering about its future.