Book Review: A Solid Introduction to Lakes

Lakes: Their Birth, Life, and Death  

by John Richard Saylor 

Timber Press, 2022, 240pp.

As someone whose fiction and nonfiction both often concern lake ecosystems and the life they support, I was looking for a primer to help me dig into the basic science. Saylor does not disappoint.  

Here I learned the ways lakes form, the ways they exchange oxygen and CO2, and the life and death of lakes themselves, something I'd never really thought about.  Another topic I knew little about is the controversy over how some lakes, the most famous being the Carolina Bays, formed and obtained their symmetrical shapes. (Saylor says correctly that extraterrestrial impact would have to be improbably precise, but he doesn't 100% rule it out, and none of the other theories works well.) He explores ice, glaciers, subglacial lakes, salt lakes, surface tension, overturning (the layers of water flip, oxygenating the depths) and many other topics. He also discusses ecology and the damage humans and their side effects, like agricultural runoff, are doing to so many of these vital bodies of water. The prose is readable although dry in spots, and I only had to reread to get the mechanisms or facts he was describing at two points. 

 I had some quibbles that held back a fifth star. Saylor doesn't treat the life within lakes - why which lakes have which types of plants and animals, the food chain, and how all lake life interacts - in as much (there's no way to avoid the word) depth as I hoped. And the book needs more illustrations. At one point he describes where factors fall on a graph without even showing the graph or offering examples of lakes the reader might be familiar with. The (here we go again) bottom line, though, is that I came away much better informed than I had been, so on balance Saylor definitely achieved his main goal. This is a reference everyone who enjoys the bounty of lakes, wonders about them, or writes about them should definitely have on the shelf. 

 Matt Bille is a writer, historian, and naturalist living in Colorado Springs. He can be reached at mattsciwriter@protonmail.com. Website: www.mattbilleauthor.com.

Read Matt's Latest book, Of Books and Beasts: A Cryptozoologist's Library. This unique reference offers a friendly skeptic's 400 reviews of books on cryptozoology, zoology, related sciences, and cryptozoological fiction. Your search for the world's new and undiscovered animals begins here!