Not just for birders, this captivating book brims with warmth, humor, and drama that will have wide appeal.
The frantic, rewarding life of a hummingbird-rescue hotline worker.
In this bright, engrossing debut, Masear, who teaches English as a second language at UCLA Extension, recounts her experiences as a rehabber of injured or orphaned hummingbirds in Los Angeles. Since 2008, some 20,000 callers have sought her help for birds in trouble. Whether hit by a golf ball in Bel Air, or by a stretch limousine in Beverly Hills, or simply found floating in a Hollywood Hills swimming pool, the cute, charismatic little creatures invariably win the hearts of humans—and prove demanding, stress-inducing patients. “I got involved in saving hummingbirds because their delicate beauty and poetic flight spoke to my soul,” writes Masear, who spends her summers advising panicky callers regarding birds in distress (“The birds are screaming, my kids are crying, and my wife hates me….What do I do?”), often conducting rescues herself. In a film-prop warehouse, she saved one trapped bird by duct-taping an antique butterfly net to an aboriginal spear. With a sharp eye for anecdotes—both bird and human—the author offers highly readable stories of birds like Gabriel, who was near death when she began his five-month rehabilitation, and an astonishing range of callers, from goths and martial artists to the woman who communicated telepathically with birds in her backyard. There are five species of hummingbirds in the Los Angeles area—the Allen’s and Anna’s are most common—and their numbers range in the thousands. Masear describes their courtship practices, flight maneuvers, and migrations; her hectic rounds of half-hourly feedings; and her emotional trauma over birds she cannot save. For her own guidance, she turns to the ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu (“Surrender yourself humbly; then you can be trusted to care for all things”). In the past four decades, Southern California rehabbers have released more than 10,000 healthy young hummingbirds.
Not just for birders, this captivating book brims with warmth, humor, and drama that will have wide appeal.Pub Date: June 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-544-41603-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2015
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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