A fine coffee-table tome about a rich and threatened ecosystem.
A remnant group of elusive caribou in the Rocky Mountains embody the plight of a wilderness under siege in this lavishly illustrated eco-study.
Moskowitz (Wolves in the Land of Salmon, 2013, etc.), a wildlife tracker and photographer, explores the lives of the so-called “mountain caribou,” a subpopulation of reindeer living in a region of the Rockies that’s also the world’s largest interior temperate rainforest, stretching some 500 miles from Washington and Idaho to British Columbia. The area’s old-growth forests, watered by heavy rainfall and deep winter snowpack, furnish an unusual ecological niche for the caribou, who migrate up and down the mountains, subsisting mainly on lichen. Meanwhile, the caribou’s endangered status energizes human efforts to protect the forests from man-made encroachments. Moskowitz analyzes this biologically unique environment and the complex adaptations that caribou and other creatures have that enable them to survive there, surveys the destruction wrought by logging operations, examines the place of caribou in Indigenous cultures, and celebrates his own communion with primeval nature: “I bask in a moment of grace,” he writes about spying a grizzly and her cub in a clearing. The author’s tone occasionally gets strident, as when he decries “the juggernaut of Western civilization’s cancerous relationship with its habitat.” But his absorbing natural history usually makes a more measured, if still ardent, plea for preserving the forest and its fauna while also accommodating limited, sustainable human use of its resources. The book is strewn with gorgeous color photographs, most taken with camera traps that used motion detectors to sense and snap passing beasts. The caribou browsing the foliage or sniffing the lens aren’t the most visually charismatic creatures, and they frequently come off as a bit mangy. But other animals steal the show, including majestic bears, hypnotic mountain lions, suave lynxes, quarrelsome marmots, shrill wrens, and imperturbable toads. Moskowitz’s composed landscapes—featuring stars and the aurora borealis shimmering above trees, craggy peaks, soft meadows, and ravaged clear-cuts—are especially good and make a powerful argument for conservation.
A fine coffee-table tome about a rich and threatened ecosystem.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-68051-128-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Braided River
Review Posted Online: Oct. 8, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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