Discerning and lucid meditations on life, sight, death, the land, friendship, and virtue and hope and God, from Hoagland (Balancing Acts: Essays, 1992, etc.). After having gone virtually sightless for three years, Hoagland had his vision surgically returned to him. Evidently, his new plastic implants are of the unalloyed variety, for these essays are altogether perspicuous (“When negotiating with the force of gravity, or with a pride of lions, you foil, not crush, the lions’ charge, so you will have their partnership tomorrow, and make light of gravity’s pull”). He wades right into touchy subjects: suicide, that subversive judgment on the social polity, “grandiose . . . or drably mousy,” and how surviving the impulse makes one warier and chastened, like surviving a heart attack or a cancer operation. On friends: “You give me vitamins; I’ll give you minerals. You give me understanding; I’ll give you patience . . . we muddle through the middle territory of life with their assistance,” sharing “the promiscuity of total, casual confidences.” Five of the eleven pieces involve the celebration of place, from his Vermont home and the “springs in the high woods where the brooks begin” to the rude seas, gelid weather, and all-around stern medicine that is Antarctica, the last being the longest essay in the collection and an exquisitely transporting narrative of wayfaring. For Hoagland still wears his American Transcendentalism on his sleeve, with his “lifelong belief that heaven is on earth,” and the ineradicable astonishment of his “generation’s failure to push past token gestures to change the world for good and to be less greedy and violence-prone than the generations before.” Perhaps it is because Hoagland doesn’t want anything to blur his new eyes—no poetic fog, no lint from overwriting—that these essays are as crisp as those Antarctic vistas, or perhaps turning 60 has made him less chary. Whatever, they are pure food for thought, each chapter a multicourse meal.
Pub Date: March 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-55821-742-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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