Outstanding, possibly mind-changing natural history.
Page-turning stories of creatures most of us despise, mostly undeservedly.
Brookshire, the host of the podcast Science for the People, begins her excellent natural history in a beautiful Indian temple filled with perhaps 25,000 common rats. According to the local religion, these rats are reincarnated people, so they are fed, cared for, and worshipped. Chronicling her travels around the world to interview experts, the author delivers fascinating accounts of a score of widely deplored pests, from the no-brainers (rats, mice, pigeons) to the controversial (snakes, deer, raccoons) to a few shockers. Readers may be surprised to learn that pigeon was once a major food source. City dwellers raised them on roofs and in backyards. After World War II, cheap supermarket chicken took over, and the pigeons were released to thrive on the streets. The first recorded description of pigeons as “rats with wings” came in 1966. Few consider cats to be drivers of environmental problems, but “feral, stray, and outdoor domestic cats together slaughter one to four billion birds and six to twenty-two billion mammals every year in the contiguous United States.” Worldwide, they are the leading cause of animal extinction, especially on islands, including Australia, where cats are officially designated pests. As Brookshire shows throughout, the concept of a pest is in the eye of the beholder. “Rats are disgusting because humans are,” she notes. They thrive on human garbage and sewage, and we are too lazy to seal our trash and too cheap to pay the taxes to build rat-free infrastructure and housing. Elephants are magnificent, but they destroy crops and kill a surprising number of people. “Between 2014 and 2019, 2,398 people died in India—trampled and torn apart by elephants.” Though humans are voracious predators, when we encounter a “pest,” we feel like prey. In the insightful conclusion, Brookshire emphasizes that we must give up some power, tolerate occasional inconvenience, and acknowledge that there are some things we cannot control.
Outstanding, possibly mind-changing natural history.Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-309725-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2022
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.
A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.
In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536131
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
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SEEN & HEARD
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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