Fans of wolves, field biology, and good natural history writing will welcome Mech’s long-overdue reminiscences.
A naturalist’s memoir of seasons spent over many decades studying the ways of wolves.
No one knows more about wolves than Mech, a Minnesota-based researcher for the U.S. Geological Survey. As he writes in this engaging narrative, he started off working with bears, but, “while I was interested in weasels and mink, their wilderness relative the fisher fascinated me even more. Among the dog family, I was fond of working with foxes, but I much preferred snowshoeing through the Adirondack Mountains in search of their larger, wilder cousin, the coyote, or brush wolf.” An almost-chance encounter with a scholar who would become a mentor took him to Purdue University for graduate study, and there he was posted to Isle Royale National Park, a remote outpost in Lake Superior closer to Canada than the U.S. Moose had swum to the island long before, and in pursuit came a small squad of wolves. “It had no roads, so visitors arrived by boat and traveled on foot on its trails, or by water along the shoreline,” writes Mech. “No one lived there for most of the year.” That was just fine by him. In time, a wife and child joined him, but the author had much of the island to himself, commanding great views from a granite ridgeline on one hand and getting down to ground level to study wolf scat on the other. It was wild country with no end of danger, but “I learned that patience was the most important ingredient of safety.” Apart from a few odd interludes, including nearly becoming a John Bircher, he kept his eye on wolf-moose interactions and the fluctuating populations of both species. Given that he started at Isle Royale in 1958, his project “is the longest continuous study of any predator-prey system in the world,” a model for other studies that still raises fresh questions with every season.
Fans of wolves, field biology, and good natural history writing will welcome Mech’s long-overdue reminiscences.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5179-0825-6
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Univ. of Minnesota
Review Posted Online: July 7, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2020
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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SEEN & HEARD
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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