Highly enjoyable: a modest lepidopterous encyclopedia that piques and prods the reader into wanting to know much more....
Consider the butterfly, says Russell (Anatomy of a Rose, 2001, etc.), and it will expand your appreciation of the natural world just as it has, for centuries, expanded our souls.
Start with the simple truth of the butterfly’s beauty—in fact, start with color, to which all creatures have a response, from butterflies to apes (“Look, the gibbon says, I have a big blue bottom”), and then go deeper. Butterflies, indeed, are an ideal introduction to the natural world. They have the requisite slimy beginnings as bags of goo that “spit acrid vomit and emit poisonous gas,” which will appeal to one set of people, then undergo their amazing metamorphosis into radiance, which will appeal to another. There are the mayhem, trickery, and tribulations of their youth—“For a caterpillar, it never ends. There is always one more thing to worry about”—the parry and thrust of survival, when even the leaves have it out for them: “In one passion vine plant, the larger instars of the caterpillar are caught and held on small hooks. The scene is medieval.” Russell speaks clearly and enticingly about butterflies’ close friendship with ants, the adaptiveness of these beautiful insects, the flexibility of their brains, their patterns of migration, and also about the work of various lepidopterists (Henry Bates, Alfred Russell Wallace, Martha Weiss, Vladimir Nabokov). And don’t forget cultural symbolism. Russell takes the insects’ eye-popping decorative excess—all mirrors and prisms—and makes more of it, explaining coloration’s role in distraction, camouflage, and mimicry, commenting that it can serve the same role as the skull-and-crossbones on a bottle of poison. Not only do butterflies possess cultural power, but they now have political power enough to stop a highway or, just imagine, a golf course, from being built.
Highly enjoyable: a modest lepidopterous encyclopedia that piques and prods the reader into wanting to know much more. (Illustrations)Pub Date: June 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7382-0699-7
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Perseus
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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