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AMERICAN BIRDS

Name: AMERICAN BIRDS
Author: Terry Tempest Williams
ISBN: 978-1-59853-655-3

A LITERARY COMPANION

edited by Terry Tempest Williams & Andrew Rubenfeld ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2020

An exquisite compendium celebrating America’s ornithological obsession from its Colonial origins to its fractious present.

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A new anthology collects 235 years of American bird writing.

Can one diagnose the state of a nation through its attitude toward its aviary? This new volume from the Library of America makes such a project seem possible, assembling a centurieslong archive of U.S. bird writing that claims to act as nothing less than a “field guide to the American soul.” Indeed, a well-worn literary history can be wrought from these pages: From Lewis and Clark’s meticulous taxonomizing, through Thoreau’s starry-eyed transcendentalism, to Bishop’s magisterial modernism and the elegiac atmospherics of latter-day Erdrich. But lesser-known texts shine amid their star-studded company, such as Sarah Orne Jewett's early (1886!) environmentalist short fiction and John Hollander’s 1968 calligram in the shape of a swan and its reflection on a pond. The entries are unified by a sense of heightened attention induced by the writer’s encounter with a wild, flying thing; beyond this, however, the genres, moods, and styles are as diverse as the birds they catalog. (That said, 20th-century poetry gets more than its fair share of pages, and there is a disappointing but predictable preponderance of men to women writers.) On the whole, one gets the sense that birds hold a special symbolic place in the American experiment: a fantasy of freedom as manifest in flight, alluring yet unattainable, a perpetual promise remaining elusive even after the airplane. Robert Creeley writes the paradox beautifully: “The birds, / no matter they’re not of our kind, / seem most like us here. I want // to go where they go, in a way, if / a small and common one.”

An exquisite compendium celebrating America’s ornithological obsession from its Colonial origins to its fractious present.

Pub Date: March 10, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-59853-655-3

Page Count: 270

Publisher: Library of America

Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020

Categories:

NATURE

- BOOK REVIEW
EROSION
by Terry Tempest Williams

- BOOK REVIEW
THE HOUR OF LAND
by Terry Tempest Williams

- BOOK REVIEW
WHEN WOMEN WERE BIRDS
by Terry Tempest Williams

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FIRE IN THE TURTLE HOUSE

THE GREEN SEA TURTLE AND THE FATE OF THE OCEAN

by Osha Gray Davidson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 2001

Davidson brings environmental passion, as well as a gimlet-eyed environmental appreciation, to the turtles’ predicament,...

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A lucid and disturbing report on grim happenings in the sea-turtle world—and by extension the oceans themselves—from Davidson (The Enchanted Braid, 1998, etc.).

A pestilence is burning through the populations of sea turtles: fibropapillomatosis (FP), a nasty little virus now a serious epidemic, perhaps the most serious epidemic raging through the nonhuman world: outbreaks of FP have been found from Hawaii to Australia to Florida’s Indian River Lagoon, while the mortality rates and the startling spread of the disease give it the profile of an emerging virus. FP forms tumors over the body of the sea turtles and eventually kills them. As Davidson explains, it is transglobal, has claimed up to 90 percent of some sea-turtle populations, and has jumped species within the sea-turtle world, attacking victims already in danger of extinction. Davidson’s steady voice carries momentum as he suggests that FP may well be another warning light that we are on the verge of leaving our children an oceanic environment resembling “a sickly ghost, drained of animal life and crowded with pathogens.” Following the scientists as they search for answers to the FP crisis, Davidson provides insights into both the environmental assaults on the green sea turtle—overhunting, habitat destruction, transforming coastal waterways into breeding grounds for disease, global warming—and the preliminary biological thinking behind the causes of FP, which include non-native pathogenic pollution such as toxic dinoflagellates in algae and the mysterious workings of the herpes virus. But it is impossible to escape an obvious element, “and that’s precisely the one characteristic shared by all FP hotspots: humans have radically changed the marine environment in which the diseased turtles live.”

Davidson brings environmental passion, as well as a gimlet-eyed environmental appreciation, to the turtles’ predicament, giving the plague a moral dimension as well as delivering on the scientific one.