Fascinating. A delight for anyone interested in bird life and issues of extinction and endangerment.
Informed musings on humanity’s relationship with nature and the extinction of animal species.
Weidensaul, a devoted naturalist whose 1999 Living on the Wind: Across the Hemisphere with Migratory Birds was a Pulitzer finalist, guides the reader on a variety of lively quests for extinct or soon-to-be-extinct creatures. Indiana Jones–style, he seeks the rare Sempler’s warbler on the lush Caribbean isle of St. Lucia, tracks panthers across the English countryside, and endures heat, mud, and scorpions in search of Tasmania’s cone-billed tanager. Closer to home, he stalks the legendary ivorybilled woodpecker of bayou Louisiana. Weidensaul’s globe-trotting also turns up a splendid menagerie of human characters—birders, biologists, anthropologists, adventurers, river guides, livestock farmers—some of whom surpass even the author in their passion for the intricate mysteries and delights of the natural world. Weidensaul is wise enough to know that the belief that hard-to-find species are still out there somewhere is as important as the reality. In this vein, he delves into the science of cryptozoology, the study of such shadowy creatures as the Himalayan yeti and the Loch Ness Monster, and offers a sympathetic explanation as to why such mythical creatures persist in the human imagination. He discusses the loss of fierce “apex predators” such as grizzlies, wolves, and cougars, and the concerns about their reappearance or reintroduction, and devotes equal attention to a myriad of other animals as common as ferrets and prairie dogs, or as obscure as the Australian thylacine. He also gives an overview of some of the new science affecting the extinction issue, such as cloning. Weidensaul is an author with a nuanced appreciation for his subject, an environmentalist’s sense for the delicate balance between nature and human endeavor, and the ability to give vivid and lucid expression to his ideas. Like the best nature-writers, he succeeds at making scientific inquiry an adventure.
Fascinating. A delight for anyone interested in bird life and issues of extinction and endangerment.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-374-24664-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: North Point/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2002
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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