A hopeful consideration of the beauty and fate of wild sea turtles—and the natural world as a whole.
An aquatic ecologist recounts his search for reasons for optimism in the face of looming extinction crises.
When Covid-19 lockdowns closed seaports, Streever, author of Cold and Heat, and his wife, a marine biologist, were at sea aboard their restored sailboat Rocinante. Cleared into a Mexican port, they spent the next several years sailing in the Gulf of California, off the Baja peninsula, where five species of sea turtles now exist. Noting that “engaging with those who make a living from the sea is a necessary part of the conservation movement,” the author interviewed the volunteer "turtlers" who find and protect turtle nests, nonprofit professionals working to promote biodiversity, a veterinarian who performed a necropsy on a dead turtle, and local fishermen. He found that the gulf area suffers from “inadequate enforcement of mostly existing regulations and a lack of opportunities for people aside from fishing.” Though the region is “one of the five most productive marine ecosystems in the world,” it has become "a badly diminished sea." Streever zeroes in on the fate of sea turtles, but his larger concern is existential. If we conceive of the history of life on Earth as a 24-hour day, he writes, humans’ attention to the conservation of our fellow species has only arisen “a mere few seconds before midnight.” Sea turtles and other "charismatic endangered species" can serve to "draw our attention, help us change our ways." Streever makes a convincing case, based on firsthand observations, that we are overdue for a major course correction. Even if humans have proven to be the species most responsible for extinction events, the author still ends on a hopeful note, and his creed of "optimistic environmentalism" becomes something other than a confounding oxymoron.
A hopeful consideration of the beauty and fate of wild sea turtles—and the natural world as a whole.Pub Date: July 2, 2024
ISBN: 9781639366699
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2024
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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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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