Popular yet thorough, shimmering with the romance of an arcane field.
A rolling history of avian bioacoustics and a few of the admittedly eccentric characters who work the dawn hours to get the songs.
Few remain unmoved by birdsong, writes Stap (English/Univ. of Central Florida), and perhaps that has always been the case: 16,000 years ago someone painted a bird with an open beak in the caves at Lascaux. On the other hand, few go to the lengths of ornithologist Don Kroodsma, the celebrated birdsong trapper who features most prominently in this exploration of the how’s and why’s of birds singing. How do songbirds go about learning their material? Or is genetics a greater factor? What is the role of regional dialects? Is there a link between dialect and speciation? What, if any, are the advantages of a large repertoire? These and other questions are strewn on the ground like so many sunflower-seed shells, but Kroodsma presents a handful of compelling theories. Many of them, unsurprisingly, have to do with mating and territoriality. While Stap succinctly lays such questions and conjectures before the reader, his principle interest is the development of avian bioacoustics. In particular, he wants to show us what it’s like to go forth and gather the raw material in the field. This fieldwork gives the book its rawest energy, for songbirds sing most spiritedly at dawn (“perhaps to signal they made it through the night”), and Stap must rise long before sunrise to keep up with the bioacousticians. Doing so, he experiences and beautifully describes a rare, antediluvian world devoid of human noise. Then, slowly picking up momentum, come the songs, cheeps, and calls, then the chorus. There is more than one true scientific approach, says Stap, but being in the birds’ natural habitat with all its uncontrollable variables, brings a wonderful authenticity to the gleanings of birdsong understanding.
Popular yet thorough, shimmering with the romance of an arcane field.Pub Date: March 22, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-3274-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2004
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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