Next book

WHERE THE WILD THINGS WERE

LIFE, DEATH, AND ECOLOGICAL WRECKAGE IN A LAND OF VANISHING PREDATORS

A passionately rendered update on our faltering environmental stability.

Veteran wildlife journalist Stolzenburg considers the Earth’s increasingly compromised plant and animal ecosystems.

His enthusiastic debut plumbs ecological experiments relating to the predator-prey dynamic, showing how its disruption directly affects life’s diversity. Most germane to his point are “predator eradication” case studies of places where vital, top-of-the-heap carnivorous animals have been systematically decimated. This caused a cumulative imbalance in unique ecological landscapes and left “second-order predators” in charge. Since the decimation of one species directly affects the propagation of another, these disparities incited a food-chain reaction that threw off track delicate ecological soundness and biodiversity. Stolzenburg adroitly documents scores of other dangerous disproportions. Cruel, obliterative efforts to eradicate the wolf population that once thrived in Yellowstone National Park, for example, sparked a resulting surge in the elk and white-tailed deer population, which was responsible for whittling down young saplings, trampling forest undergrowth, deteriorating river banks and a spike in the prevalence of Lyme-disease-harboring deer ticks. The ocean floors of southwestern Alaska and the North Pacific coast have been stripped of kelp by hungry sea urchins, due to an absence of sea otters whose numbers have been lessened greatly by migrating killer whales. The songbird population has been compromised, the author notes, by the proliferation of such mid-sized predators as raccoons, opossums and black crows. Overly aggressive industrial fishing of Atlantic cod and bluefin tuna has made these species yet another “casualty of the agricultural age.” Stolzenburg’s fact-heavy parlance can be dry and overly didactic, but there’s no quarreling with his cautionary message: Unless measures are taken to preserve what remains of a badly deteriorating ecosystem, there could be dire consequences for planet Earth in the very near future.

A passionately rendered update on our faltering environmental stability.

Pub Date: July 1, 2008

ISBN: 978-1-59691-229-1

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Bloomsbury

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2008

Categories:
Next book

THE ELEMENTS OF STYLE

50TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION

Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...

Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.

Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").

Pub Date: May 15, 1972

ISBN: 0205632645

Page Count: 105

Publisher: Macmillan

Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972

Categories:
Next book

NUTCRACKER

This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)

Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996

ISBN: 0-15-100227-4

Page Count: 136

Publisher: Harcourt

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996

Categories:
Close Quickview