An alarming report from the ice caps.
Going to extremes.
There’s something forlorn and frightening, the biologist and science writer Shubin suggests, about being dropped off by a bush pilot in the Arctic wilderness, the opening moment in his book: Once the sound of the plane’s engines faded in the distance, “rocks, ice, and polar wildlife—along with the research we were there to do—were now our entire world.” Much of that research has to do with climate change and how it can be measured, let alone how it can be countered. There, the world offers two vast laboratories: the Arctic, most specifically Greenland, and the Antarctic, which, unlike its northern counterpart, is internationally administered and cannot be claimed by a single nation, the better—theoretically, anyway—to ensure international cooperation. There are plenty of surprises to discover in both places. One of Shubin’s goals is to study how glaciers move and, more specifically, melt away, as they are doing at an astonishingly rapid rate in Greenland: Writing of a Finnish research team’s findings, for instance, Shubin notes, “the Arctic warmed four times faster than the rest of the world since 1979,” with the resulting disappearance of sea ice. The Antarctic is melting more slowly but is melting nonetheless, and in interesting ways; Shubin takes readers under the Southern Ocean to look at how glaciers melt not from atop but from below, advancing and retreating measurably across the seafloor just offshore. It’s a discovery that he rightly finds unsettling: An astonishing diversity of viruses and bacteria is thawing out with the ice, and “the viruses released by melting glaciers could spill over to local plant and animal hosts.” All’s not hopeless, Shubin concludes in this accessible, nontechnical narrative—but, reading between the lines, there doesn’t seem to be much hope, either.
An alarming report from the ice caps.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593186527
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2025
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
BOOK REVIEW
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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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BOOK TO SCREEN
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