'A Supremely Bad Idea'

Many rare birds are sighted in Luke Dempsey's "A Supremely Bad Idea: Three Mad Birders and their Quest to See it All," but his traveling companions and the people he meets are rare as well, more than a bit cuckoo, if I may continue the bird metaphor.

Dempsey, editor-in-chief of Hudson Street Press, had paid scant heed to birds for most of his life until his friends Don and Donna Graffiti (real name) visit him in rural Pennsylvania, give him a spare pair of beat-up binoculars and show him in the nearby bushes a common yellowthroat, a warbler. The rest is mania. From then on, Dempsey and the Graffitis (not a bad name for a rock group) lark (sorry) about the country birding, and there is much to enjoy and to learn from their adventures.

Who knew, for instance, that southeast Arizona is a birders' heaven because it is the upper reach of the subtropical range for Central American birds? In that setting, the three mad birders meet the Harpy Queen of Birding Guides, a woman whose bawling and hollering out bird names to her elderly charges scares those very birds away.

Luckily, she hasn't frightened the elegant trogon, a seldom-sighted, stunningly beautiful black, white and red, and luckily Dempsey and friends don't stop there. In Texas they see birds and illegal border-crossers; in Florida, a male osprey being harassed by the Dunce family; in Michigan, the elusive Kirtland's warbler.

"A Supremely Bad Idea" is supremely entertaining, engaging and even inspirational reading. Great fun.

'The Best American Science Writing 2008'

"The Best American Science Writing 2008" should probably really be called the Best American Behavioral and Biological Science Writing, since the physical sciences make scant appearance in these pages. This is understandable given that Sylvia Nasar, author of "A Beautiful Mind," is the editor.

Go with your strength, eh? And there are many strong stories here, such as the brutal opening essay about a young woman who chooses to undergo genetic testing to see whether she is fated to develop Huntington's disease (she is), or the fascinating discussion of cancer using the processes of natural selection to override the body's defense mechanisms.

Well-known authors appear here -- Oliver Sacks, Jerome Groopman, Al Gore -- as do "new-to-me" writers with fascinating stories to tell about the Global Seed Diversity Trust, which guards against the apocalypse of famine, the agonizing supply-and-demand constraints of kidney transplants, and when does a freely subscribing doctor become a pusher? Good questions answered in clear and accessible prose for the interested lay reader.

• Laura Wadley is a librarian with the Provo City Library. E-mail her at lauraw@provo.lib.ut.us.