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 short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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SEEN & HEARD
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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