Shade: The Forgotten Promise of a Natural Resource by Sam Bloch. Random House, 336 pp., $32.
Chapter Seven, Book Two, of Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, “The Wonderful Forms of Different Nations,” is a peculiar part of a peculiar work. It’s basically a catalogue of “monster races” from places that aren’t Greece, an odd mixture of reference text and campfire tale. There are people with dog heads and the people with holes in their faces instead of nostrils and people who can kill you by looking at you. In India, supposedly, near the people with no necks and eyes on their shoulders, there are the Sciapodae. The Sciapodae are monopods, beings with one foot—one very large, very wide foot—said to reside “where there is no shadow.” In times of intense heat, the Sciapodae lay down on their backs, which seems like a questionable tactic except that they “protect themselves from the sun with the shade of their feet.” Imagine someone face up, their legs curled over them in a C shape, with a generous spatula-like awning at the top, and there you have …