The Path: A One-Mile Walk Through the Universe

The Los Angeles Times

Chet Raymo's The Path is a cannonball fired across the bow of the SS Reality TV, a wretched ship sailing on most of the major networks. Distilled from a lifetime's experience, the book wrests back an appreciation for the ordinary from all those silly shows that capture the world, complete with soundtrack. While the situations on the tube are so wearily contrived, Raymo's book uses the slightest of conceits: He takes readers on a walk. — Nick Owchar

Publishers Weekly

Raymo (An Intimate Look at the Night Sky), a physicist at Stonehill College, agrees with Walt Whitman that "there is a sense in which the least thing contains the all." The least things in Raymo's universe occur on a one-mile path he has walked every day for 37 years between his home and his office in North Easton, Mass. Along this path that he knows so well, he writes, "every pebble and wildflower has a story to tell"-geological stories, environmental stories, human stories. Raymo uses each ecologically distinct portion of his path as a starting point for one of those tales. He is at his best when he relates the tale of the path itself, how it was constructed by the great landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted as part of an estate for the great-grandson of shovel magnate Oliver Ames. The beginning of the path at the end of a suburban street provides the opportunity to discuss the origin of the village of North Easton at the close of the 18th century: the small Queset Brook supplying the power needed to run the factory that would dominate the village for a century and a half. As the path meanders from woods to open fields, from gardens to water meadow, Raymo discusses ecological relationships, the nature of DNA, basic geology and contemporary environmental concerns. Although always interesting , Raymo's stories are less compelling and more superficial the further afield he goes. But this slim, lovingly written volume helps readers become more observant of the natural portions of their world. 8 b&w illus. not seen by PW. (Apr.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

As Raymo (Skeptics and True Believers) walks a one-mile path to Stonehill College in Easton, Massachusetts, where he teaches physics and astronomy, he passes through village, woods, and field, musing on everything from the genetic code of a monarch butterfly to the positive side of DDT. He reflects on the cultural legacy of landscape architect Frederick Law Olmstead and industrial entrepreneur Oliver Ames; and on an interesting, if frightening, theory of evolution that places the computer chip further along the evolutionary line than the human brain. Although these ramblings seem disjointed at times-we wonder how we got from the topic of hydrology to the Bobbsey Twins-Raymo remains centered on his point that the past connects to the present in ways seen and unseen. The more we know, the more we realize that the universe is present in a single object. Throughout, Raymo instills a sense of wonder in the workings of the natural world and exhibits a deep faith in science and technology. Recommended for larger public libraries.-Maureen J. Delaney-Lehman, Lake Superior State Univ., Sault Ste. Marie, MI Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Raymo (Skeptics and True Believers, 1998, etc.) again proves himself a masterful scientist and affable guide as, simply by drawing on his daily walk to work, he shows how everything in the universe is connected to everything else. For 37 years, he says, he has "walked the same path" back and forth from home to work--work being the teaching of physics and astronomy at Stonehill College in North Easton, Massachusetts. Not only have those years made him familiar indeed with the flora and fauna of his route "along a street of century-old houses, through woods and fields, across a stream," but familiar also with the history--civic, industrial, architectural--his path takes him through. Much of the landscape, he tells us, was designed by the great landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted (of Central Park fame) for a member of the Ames family, the family that first (in 1803) harnessed the energy of the stream, Queset Brook, to begin the shovel-making factory that would grow eventually to provide most of the hand-digging tools for America’s westward expansion. "Scratch a name in a landscape," says Raymo, "and history bubbles up like a spring." Indeed it does, at least when Raymo does the scratching--and science bubbles up too, as, for example, he shows us how the Queset Brook (the Ames family "turned water and gravity into a family fortune") is a small and interrelated part of all Earth’s water, and then how water in turn is an interrelated part of all life. In mid-century, the switch from water to coal power brought about "something profound," a change that leads Raymo to guide us through still more history--all the way up to "greenhouse warming"--and still more science, botanical ("Coal isfossilized plants"), physical ("a lump of coal is a packet of stored sunlight"), even chemical, as we learn what we are made of. A little masterpiece combining the individual and the cosmic with a fine but unflinching eye: informative, captivating, heartfelt. Agent: John Williams