A colorful and lively look at the controversy surrounding the plan of a New Jersey academic couple to return vast sections of the American Great Plains to their original prairie state. For Frank and Deborah Popper (a land-use planner and a geologist, respectively), the writing is on the wall as far as the semi-arid Plains are concerned. Stretching from Canada through Montana and the Dakotas to Oklahoma and Texas, the area, explains Matthews (Nonfiction Writing/Princeton), was settled by hardy sod- busters late in the last century after the Indians and buffalo had been successfully removed. The newcomers' determined tilling of the prairie soil and heavy grazing by their livestock opened the door to dust-bowl conditions whenever drought occurred, while persistent water demands depleted the aquifer to a fraction of its preagricultural reserve. With the resulting ecological stress readily apparent today, Matthews indicates, radical action seems necessary. The author follows the Poppers on several of their many forays into hostile country, chronicling their rise in notoriety from the inception of their ideas in 1987. In Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Montana, in talks before large audiences and in more casual encounters on the main streets of dying towns, the response is always the same: stiff resistance and shock in the face of apparently undeniable facts. The Poppers' plan for a ``Buffalo Commons''—to be created from dozens of distressed counties in ten Plains states—has created a big stir out west, so that so much of Matthews's report turns not on their ideas but on the couple themselves, in public and private, with media attention and personal responses to them figuring prominently. Eminently readable as a study of personalities and regional differences, and as a popular account of a provocative proposal that may herald a sea change in American land-planning. (Four photographs; one map.)
Pub Date: May 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-8021-1408-3
Page Count: 203
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1992
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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