Meticulous almost to a fault, but flashing with human interest and keen environmental insight: an illuminating march through...
Magazine journalist Klucas debuts with a patiently detailed unfolding of the environmental missteps that have marked the entire history of Leadville, Colorado.
The town sits atop an impressive array of mineral deposits: silver and gold, copper and manganese, molybdenite, and, of course, lead. This variety, explains Klucas, allowed Leadville to survive when other one-horse mining burgs went bust. During its heyday, the town hosted Oscar Wilde and Sarah Bernhardt at the opera, made a multimillionaire of Meyer Guggenheim, and generated enormous quantities of waste. Even during lean times, Leadville was a community tightly knit by friendship, camaraderie, and pride in its mining tradition. But tunnels often burped a gush of suspended metals into the Arkansas River, creating Technicolor hues. One spectacular belch coincided with the rise of environmental concern across the country, bringing the EPA, the CDC, and other federal agencies to Leadville’s door and earning it a reputation as the Rockies’ Poison Central. At this moment, the story gets really interesting, and the author’s clarifying touch pays off. The defenders of the environment came on like gangbusters, alienating the citizenry to such an extent that they found the EPA more toxic than the tailings. Klucas shows that all concerned parties acted in their own worst interests: the regulators creating a stultifying bureaucracy, the mine operators treating the problem as a legal rather than an engineering issue, the Colorado attorney general filing an absurd class-action lawsuit. “Any law that invites this much litigation is poorly drafted,” one judge commented, referring to the Superfund’s severe liability provisions and general clumsiness. “Why should you pass a law that is so complicated that everyone spends more on lawyers than they do on the technical side solving the problem?” Character sketches provide a refreshing break from all the legal squabbling and stalling; Klucas makes even the drab players as bright as the river.
Meticulous almost to a fault, but flashing with human interest and keen environmental insight: an illuminating march through environmental politics at a turning point in green awareness.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2004
ISBN: 1-55963-385-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Shearwater/Island Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 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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