Davis knits history, sociology, faith, and scientific inquiry into a colorful, meditative tapestry.
An acclaimed essayist takes a deep dive into cultural issues at home and around the world.
Aside from being a professor of anthropology at the University of British Columbia, Davis held the interesting title of Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society from 2000 to 2013. The essays in his latest book, following Magdalena, reflect his extensive travels and investigations, ranging across subjects as diverse as the history of the coca leaf to spiritualism in India. The author wrote most of the pieces during the pandemic, “the unhurried months when one who had traveled incessantly was obliged to stay still.” One of his best-known essays, “The Unraveling of America,” first published in 2020, is a lengthy contemplation on how the pandemic fits into the larger picture and history of the country. He sees the pandemic as a critical turning point, although this idea seems less strong as the crisis recedes in the rearview mirror. The best pieces display Davis’ expertise as an anthropologist, the area where he seems most at home. “The anthropological lens allows us to see, and perhaps seek, the wisdom in the middle way, a perspective of promise and hope,” he writes. Regarding climate change, he is scathing about the way that the dogma of the prevailing narrative has suppressed debate and compromise, replacing the development of viable, cost-effective solutions with meaningless, doom-laden rhetoric. Davis accepts the inherent validity of non-Western cultures and religions, although sometimes his desire to see all sides of a question means that he fails to arrive at any answer at all. Ultimately, this book is more about consideration than finality, tension rather than coherence. It is not for readers who want straightforward conclusions, but Davis offers plenty of food for thought.
Davis knits history, sociology, faith, and scientific inquiry into a colorful, meditative tapestry.Pub Date: April 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781778400445
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Greystone Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 13, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.
A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.
In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536131
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
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SEEN & HEARD
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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