A buoyant celebration of seabirds that serves as an important reminder of nature’s fragility.
At home on sea, land, and in air, seabirds demonstrate grace, power, and amazing ingenuity.
Naturalist, essayist, and historian Nicolson (Why Homer Matters, 2014, etc.) offers intimate, engrossing portraits of 10 seabirds, based on abundant scientific research as well as firsthand observation in the birds’ natural habitats: the Shiants islands in the Outer Hebrides, Orkney, the Faeroes, Iceland, Norway, the coasts of Maine and Ireland, the Falklands, South Georgia, the Canaries, and the Azores. Winner of the Somerset Maugham Award and Ondaatje Prize, among other accolades, the author conveys with grace and precision the birds’ “life-habits and body-shapes, their various forms of adaptation, their ways of conquest and triumph.” Seabirds are ancient: fossil evidence dates some nesting sites at 44,000 years old. “The great cave paintings of the paleolithic are not as old” as a snow petrel’s fossilized stomach oil; penguins “were doing what they do now well before humankind was in Europe or the Americas.” Their survival strategies are astonishing. To feed their chicks, for example, puffins fly hundreds of miles to capture high-energy oily fish, each diving between 600 and 1,150 times daily to provide 8 to 10 feeds. A herring gull, noticing that humans were tossing bread to ducks in a pond, grabbed a piece, broke the bread into small pieces, and caught the goldfish that came up to nibble on the crumbs. Gulls, Nicolson observes, “are opportunistic omnivores,” but this one seemed uncommonly clever, although not as clever as crows, ravens, and parrots. Nurturing chicks does not always result in benevolence. Nicolson reminds readers of the “rawness” of animals, such as the “extraordinarily aggressive” gannet the Nazca booby, which lays two eggs a few weeks apart. If both hatch, the elder chick pushes its sibling out of the nest to its death by starvation or dehydration. Despite their resilience and adaptability, seabirds are vulnerable to climate change and pollution, such as rubbish and plastics, which shearwaters, fulmars, petrels, and albatrosses often mistake for food.
A buoyant celebration of seabirds that serves as an important reminder of nature’s fragility.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-13418-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2017
PERSPECTIVES
A quirky wonder of a book.
A Peabody Award–winning NPR science reporter chronicles the life of a turn-of-the-century scientist and how her quest led to significant revelations about the meaning of order, chaos, and her own existence.
Miller began doing research on David Starr Jordan (1851-1931) to understand how he had managed to carry on after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed his work. A taxonomist who is credited with discovering “a full fifth of fish known to man in his day,” Jordan had amassed an unparalleled collection of ichthyological specimens. Gathering up all the fish he could save, Jordan sewed the nameplates that had been on the destroyed jars directly onto the fish. His perseverance intrigued the author, who also discusses the struggles she underwent after her affair with a woman ended a heterosexual relationship. Born into an upstate New York farm family, Jordan attended Cornell and then became an itinerant scholar and field researcher until he landed at Indiana University, where his first ichthyological collection was destroyed by lightning. In between this catastrophe and others involving family members’ deaths, he reconstructed his collection. Later, he was appointed as the founding president of Stanford, where he evolved into a Machiavellian figure who trampled on colleagues and sang the praises of eugenics. Miller concludes that Jordan displayed the characteristics of someone who relied on “positive illusions” to rebound from disaster and that his stand on eugenics came from a belief in “a divine hierarchy from bacteria to humans that point[ed]…toward better.” Considering recent research that negates biological hierarchies, the author then suggests that Jordan’s beloved taxonomic category—fish—does not exist. Part biography, part science report, and part meditation on how the chaos that caused Miller’s existential misery could also bring self-acceptance and a loving wife, this unique book is an ingenious celebration of diversity and the mysterious order that underlies all existence.
A quirky wonder of a book.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6027-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
Unsentimental nature writing that sheds as much light on humans as on eels.
An account of the mysterious life of eels that also serves as a meditation on consciousness, faith, time, light and darkness, and life and death.
In addition to an intriguing natural history, Swedish journalist Svensson includes a highly personal account of his relationship with his father. The author alternates eel-focused chapters with those about his father, a man obsessed with fishing for this elusive creature. “I can’t recall us ever talking about anything other than eels and how to best catch them, down there by the stream,” he writes. “I can’t remember us speaking at all….Because we were in…a place whose nature was best enjoyed in silence.” Throughout, Svensson, whose beat is not biology but art and culture, fills his account with people: Aristotle, who thought eels emerged live from mud, “like a slithering, enigmatic miracle”; Freud, who as a teenage biologist spent months in Trieste, Italy, peering through a microscope searching vainly for eel testes; Johannes Schmidt, who for two decades tracked thousands of eels, looking for their breeding grounds. After recounting the details of the eel life cycle, the author turns to the eel in literature—e.g., in the Bible, Rachel Carson’s Under the Sea Wind, and Günter Grass’ The Tin Drum—and history. He notes that the Puritans would likely not have survived without eels, and he explores Sweden’s “eel coast” (what it once was and how it has changed), how eel fishing became embroiled in the Northern Irish conflict, and the importance of eel fishing to the Basque separatist movement. The apparent return to life of a dead eel leads Svensson to a consideration of faith and the inherent message of miracles. He warns that if we are to save this fascinating creature from extinction, we must continue to study it. His book is a highly readable place to begin learning.
Unsentimental nature writing that sheds as much light on humans as on eels.Pub Date: May 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-296881-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 29, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
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