Lyrical and thought-provoking but sometimes convoluted.
A BBC radio producer and nature writer visits four fields in England, Zambia, the Ukraine and the United States to reflect on humanity’s uneasy relationship with both nature and itself.
For Dee (The Running Sky: A Birdwatching Life, 2009), “[f]ields offer the most articulate description and vivid enactment of our life here on earth, of how we live within the grain of the world and against it.” He begins this collection of nine essays with the description of one field he knows best, Burwell Fen in England. An ancient seabed once covered by saltwater, humans learned to drain it and use the land for farming and herding. Ironically, the modern drive to repair damaged ecosystems and return them to their original states has subjected these “natural” spaces to still more human manipulation. Fields in less-developed parts of the world like Zambia have also not been spared from the interfering ways of mankind. All over the African continent, “[h]abitats are being degraded, forests are cut to nothing, lakes fouled, fetid shanties grow as large as cities.” Like the Montana prairie where the 1876 Battle of Little Bighorn took place, fields can also mark historical events, just as they can serve as symbols for the at-times tragic fates of the humans—in this case, the Plains Indians—who inhabit them. They can also suggest the way that nature can mirror mankind’s destructiveness. As the author shows in his essay on the meadows near the Chernobyl nuclear reactor in the Ukraine, the land has become “a sink…[that] takes life in but gives next to no life out.” Sprawling in its descriptions of nature and of the histories that inform each of the places he visits, Dee’s work defies linearity. It is best read as one man’s idiosyncratic prose-poem meditation on the way human activities affect, for better and for worse, the eternal “transubstantiation of the earth.”
Lyrical and thought-provoking but sometimes convoluted.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1619024618
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
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
The book is not entirely negative; final chapters indicate roads of reversal, before it is too late!
It should come as no surprise that the gifted author of The Sea Around Usand its successors can take another branch of science—that phase of biology indicated by the term ecology—and bring it so sharply into focus that any intelligent layman can understand what she is talking about.
Understand, yes, and shudder, for she has drawn a living portrait of what is happening to this balance nature has decreed in the science of life—and what man is doing (and has done) to destroy it and create a science of death. Death to our birds, to fish, to wild creatures of the woods—and, to a degree as yet undetermined, to man himself. World War II hastened the program by releasing lethal chemicals for destruction of insects that threatened man’s health and comfort, vegetation that needed quick disposal. The war against insects had been under way before, but the methods were relatively harmless to other than the insects under attack; the products non-chemical, sometimes even introduction of other insects, enemies of the ones under attack. But with chemicals—increasingly stronger, more potent, more varied, more dangerous—new chain reactions have set in. And ironically, the insects are winning the war, setting up immunities, and re-emerging, their natural enemies destroyed. The peril does not stop here. Waters, even to the underground water tables, are contaminated; soils are poisoned. The birds consume the poisons in their insect and earthworm diet; the cattle, in their fodder; the fish, in the waters and the food those waters provide. And humans? They drink the milk, eat the vegetables, the fish, the poultry. There is enough evidence to point to the far-reaching effects; but this is only the beginning,—in cancer, in liver disorders, in radiation perils…This is the horrifying story. It needed to be told—and by a scientist with a rare gift of communication and an overwhelming sense of responsibility. Already the articles taken from the book for publication in The New Yorkerare being widely discussed. Book-of-the-Month distribution in October will spread the message yet more widely.
The book is not entirely negative; final chapters indicate roads of reversal, before it is too late!Pub Date: Sept. 27, 1962
ISBN: 061825305X
Page Count: 378
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1962
APPRECIATIONS
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