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Planet Earth
Atmosphere
A Time-Life Planet Earth book. Air's Elusive Elements; Probing the Structure of the Sky; The Mysteries of Wind; The Countenance of the Clouds; "A Fuliginous and Filthy Vapor"; Prophesies of Climates to Come; The Protean Sky; Fiery Fantasies Aloft; The Architecture of the Atmosphere; Harnessing the Wayward Wind; A Gallery of Cloudscapes; An Airborne Assault on Antiquity.
- GenresScience
176 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1983
29 people want to read
About the author
Oliver E. Allen
28 booksObituary (http://tribecatrib.com/content/oliver...)
A former writer and editor for Life magazine and later editor at Time-Life Books, Oliver Ellsworth Allen authored more than a dozen books, including two histories of New York City: “New York, New York” and “The Tiger,” a history of Tammany Hall. But in Tribeca, where he moved to a Hudson Street loft overlooking Duane Park with his wife Deborah in 1982, Allen was best known for his Tribeca Trib column, “Old Tribeca,” and for his volunteer contributions to the community as co-founder of Friends of Duane Park. He also was part of a small group whose work led to the designation of Tribeca’s four historic districts.
In the 1980s, Allen joined a band of local activists that dug into the history of Tribeca’s buildings and published “The Texture of Tribeca,” by architectural historian Andrew Dolkart. The volume, illustrated with photos by Allen, provided the Landmarks Preservation Commission with the research it needed to designate Tribeca’s historic districts in 1991 and 1992.
Approached in 1994 by neighbor Lynn Ellsworth to help with her idea of restoring dilapidated Duane Park, Allen and wife Deborah were her first recruits to what was to become Friends of Duane Park.
“I called him up and he invited me over,” Ellsworth recalled during a Friends fundraising event in 2010 to honor Allen. “I explained the project and Oliver got on board immediately and it started from there.”
Like Ellsworth, Trib editor Carl Glassman was introduced to Allen by longtime Tribeca resident Jean Grillo, who told him, “You must speak to Oliver Allen,” when she heard that he and his wife April Koral were launching a new neighborhood paper.
“He didn’t know us from Adam and he knew we could only pay him a very modest fee,” Glassman recalled, “yet he immediately said he would be happy to write articles about the neighborhood’s history. That was the luckiest moment in the life of the Trib.”
Allen’s first “Old Tribeca” article appeared in the Trib’s first issue in September 1994 and the column turned out to be immensely popular. Many of the pieces were anthologized in two books, “Tales of Old Tribeca” and “Tribeca: A Pictorial History.”
“Oliver’s irrepressible enthusiasm and sense of wonder about our neighborhood and its history was contagious. He conveyed it both in person and in his writing,” said Ellsworth, founder and president of the architectural preservation group, Tribeca Trust. “He was a real defender of its many beauties and insistent on accuracy.” She called Allen “that increasingly rare kind of person” who believed in the “necessity and duty” of volunteering at the most local level.
“For him it was both a civic responsibility and a source of genuine pleasure,” she said. “He inspired those around him to follow in his footsteps. In doing all that, Oliver built, on a daily basis, that most fleeting of things: a sense of community.”
Karie Parker Davidson, a Friends of Duane Park board member, recalled Allen as “funny, curious, insightful and determined to improve his knowledge in any field.”
“On a recent visit,” she recalled, “he was learning about micro-tones, a form of intermediate musical notes as he explained it, and was re-reading classics by Dickens and Dostoyevsky all while keeping up with The New York Times and The New Yorker.”
Working in the Duane Park garden until he was 92, Parker Davidson said, “he also taught youngsters how to pot plants on Earth Day, and slung a 150-foot hose hooked up to the fire hydrant to hand-water the garden in its infancy. For years he trimmed the hedges, met the rodentologists, and kept the Parks Department historians on their toes.” (The full text of Parker Davidson's remembrance is below.)
Jane Freeman, who visited Allen frequently, wrote in an email: “Despite physical confinement in the last years, his scope of intellect and humanity remained unbounded. In the John Adams biog
A former writer and editor for Life magazine and later editor at Time-Life Books, Oliver Ellsworth Allen authored more than a dozen books, including two histories of New York City: “New York, New York” and “The Tiger,” a history of Tammany Hall. But in Tribeca, where he moved to a Hudson Street loft overlooking Duane Park with his wife Deborah in 1982, Allen was best known for his Tribeca Trib column, “Old Tribeca,” and for his volunteer contributions to the community as co-founder of Friends of Duane Park. He also was part of a small group whose work led to the designation of Tribeca’s four historic districts.
In the 1980s, Allen joined a band of local activists that dug into the history of Tribeca’s buildings and published “The Texture of Tribeca,” by architectural historian Andrew Dolkart. The volume, illustrated with photos by Allen, provided the Landmarks Preservation Commission with the research it needed to designate Tribeca’s historic districts in 1991 and 1992.
Approached in 1994 by neighbor Lynn Ellsworth to help with her idea of restoring dilapidated Duane Park, Allen and wife Deborah were her first recruits to what was to become Friends of Duane Park.
“I called him up and he invited me over,” Ellsworth recalled during a Friends fundraising event in 2010 to honor Allen. “I explained the project and Oliver got on board immediately and it started from there.”
Like Ellsworth, Trib editor Carl Glassman was introduced to Allen by longtime Tribeca resident Jean Grillo, who told him, “You must speak to Oliver Allen,” when she heard that he and his wife April Koral were launching a new neighborhood paper.
“He didn’t know us from Adam and he knew we could only pay him a very modest fee,” Glassman recalled, “yet he immediately said he would be happy to write articles about the neighborhood’s history. That was the luckiest moment in the life of the Trib.”
Allen’s first “Old Tribeca” article appeared in the Trib’s first issue in September 1994 and the column turned out to be immensely popular. Many of the pieces were anthologized in two books, “Tales of Old Tribeca” and “Tribeca: A Pictorial History.”
“Oliver’s irrepressible enthusiasm and sense of wonder about our neighborhood and its history was contagious. He conveyed it both in person and in his writing,” said Ellsworth, founder and president of the architectural preservation group, Tribeca Trust. “He was a real defender of its many beauties and insistent on accuracy.” She called Allen “that increasingly rare kind of person” who believed in the “necessity and duty” of volunteering at the most local level.
“For him it was both a civic responsibility and a source of genuine pleasure,” she said. “He inspired those around him to follow in his footsteps. In doing all that, Oliver built, on a daily basis, that most fleeting of things: a sense of community.”
Karie Parker Davidson, a Friends of Duane Park board member, recalled Allen as “funny, curious, insightful and determined to improve his knowledge in any field.”
“On a recent visit,” she recalled, “he was learning about micro-tones, a form of intermediate musical notes as he explained it, and was re-reading classics by Dickens and Dostoyevsky all while keeping up with The New York Times and The New Yorker.”
Working in the Duane Park garden until he was 92, Parker Davidson said, “he also taught youngsters how to pot plants on Earth Day, and slung a 150-foot hose hooked up to the fire hydrant to hand-water the garden in its infancy. For years he trimmed the hedges, met the rodentologists, and kept the Parks Department historians on their toes.” (The full text of Parker Davidson's remembrance is below.)
Jane Freeman, who visited Allen frequently, wrote in an email: “Despite physical confinement in the last years, his scope of intellect and humanity remained unbounded. In the John Adams biog
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June 2, 2019
And so my slow progress through the Time Life Planet Earth series continues. This is a more generalise titled as compared to the storm book (they pretty much share the science) however this returns to the internal theme shown in earlier volumes which I will admit I enjoyed more.
The book charts a lot of the history of atmospheric science from the early attempts at categorising it (from the success to the failures) to modern science - and by that I mean the science of the early 80s.
There is a lot in this book to think about - it is rather fascinating that pollution and the effects on the environment both the natural world and the one we create is discussed. So rather than the issues being a modern day problem its been around for a while and we have known about it - we just chose not to act it would seem.
However it is fascinating to see how our attitudes have changed and the evidence that was already present at the time of printing this book shows that progress is being made (even if it is too slow).
So again I feel this series of books was ahead of its time and really brings together information on a specific subject I am not sure would be so easily located (without prior knowledge at least) by accessing the Web.
The question is what are the next books in the series like.
The book charts a lot of the history of atmospheric science from the early attempts at categorising it (from the success to the failures) to modern science - and by that I mean the science of the early 80s.
There is a lot in this book to think about - it is rather fascinating that pollution and the effects on the environment both the natural world and the one we create is discussed. So rather than the issues being a modern day problem its been around for a while and we have known about it - we just chose not to act it would seem.
However it is fascinating to see how our attitudes have changed and the evidence that was already present at the time of printing this book shows that progress is being made (even if it is too slow).
So again I feel this series of books was ahead of its time and really brings together information on a specific subject I am not sure would be so easily located (without prior knowledge at least) by accessing the Web.
The question is what are the next books in the series like.
Displaying 1 of 1 review