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
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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