Outstanding natural history writing.
A fascinating exploration of deer.
“Deer are the largest wild animals we still live with in any widespread way, one of the signal species of our time, as firmly established in our cities as in our national parks,” writes journalist Howsare. They are definitely not tame, but it’s a fallacy that they prefer untouched wilderness. Human-logged forests with plenty of brush provide lots of food, as do abandoned farms, cuts under power lines, and suburban neighborhoods. In parallel with bison, they were driven nearly to extinction by hunters after the arrival of European settlers. During their low point in the early 1900s, they survived in isolated pockets, but conservation and restocking supercharged them into a spectacular wildlife restoration success story—so much so that they began to wreak havoc on farms, parks, and gardens. Cars kill hundreds of thousands of deer per year, with several hundred humans dying in the collisions. What is to be done? Howsare offers no solutions but delivers entertaining accounts of the efforts. Today’s “deer management” is the job of state wildlife agencies, who use recreational hunters as their essential tool. Yet hunters want bigger herds and prefer killing bucks to does. Because “most hunters take zero to two deer per year,” they can never reduce the population, and reintroducing wolves, bears, and other predators, even in national parks, produces fierce opposition from neighboring ranchers. Mass killing (“culling”), although popular to eliminate snakes, feral pigs, and even coyotes, produces almost universal outrage. Howsare is not a hunter, but she is evenhanded, agreeing that to eat meat and oppose killing animals doesn’t make sense. She delivers sympathetic portraits of her brother, an avid hunter, and of hunting ranches, largely denounced by the hunting establishment, where customers pay a small fortune to shoot deer and other wildlife.
Outstanding natural history writing.Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2024
ISBN: 9781646221349
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Catapult
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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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