Ingenious stories in the service of deep natural history.
The famous evolutionist meditates on his favorite topic.
Dawkins, bestselling author of The Selfish Gene, The God Delusion, and numerous other landmark books, argues persuasively that every living creature’s body and behavior can be read as a book. Confronted with a hitherto unknown animal, a future biologist could decipher its entire evolutionary history. Today’s scientists lack the technology and fossil record to deliver a detailed account, but few are more qualified than Dawkins to make the effort. Demonstrating more good sense than many of his colleagues, he makes generous use of photographs and Lenzová’s expert illustrations. The author emphasizes that every individual’s genes came to be the way they are over many generations through random drift and mutation guided by natural selection. Sexual recombination ensures that the gene pool is stirred and shaken, while mutation sees to it that new variants enter the pool. Natural and sexual selection determine the shape of the average genome changes in constructive directions. Individuals, species, and the physical DNA die, but the information in the DNA can last indefinitely. Having laid the groundwork, Dawkins proceeds with several dozen mind-bogglingly fascinating anecdotes describing animals, often wildly disparate, dipping into the ancient history of their DNA to solve problems in similar ways. A mole is a mammal, and a mole cricket is a bug. Adapted to life underground, they have evolved to look nearly identical. The same applies to marsupial and modern placental mammals, who have evolved separately for more than 150 million years. The cuckoo learns nothing from its parents, whom it never encounters, yet its DNA provides everything it needs to know from the species’ long history, including its song and its eggs, the design of which invariably changes to resemble eggs in the nest it parasitizes.
Ingenious stories in the service of deep natural history.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2024
ISBN: 9780300278095
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
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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