An irresistible account that will be of great interest to conservationists and may make cat lovers look at their pets’...
One of the world’s leading experts on big cats writes passionately on behalf of the beasts he loves.
As a child, Rabinowitz (Life in the Valley of Death: The Fight to Save Tigers in a Land of Guns, Gold, and Greed, 2007, etc.), co-founder and CEO of Panthera, a nonprofit organization dedicated to saving the world’s wild cats, discovered that he could communicate with jaguars at the Bronx Zoo. Since then, he has become a significant voice for the species. This is not merely an account of his field work or of his commendable conservation efforts (his work in Belize led to that country becoming the first in the world to give the jaguar a protected reserve); it is also a history of jaguars from the Pleistocene to the present day and an examination of the complex relationship between jaguars and the early civilizations of the New World. While various pre-Columbian cultures revered the jaguar, royalty and warriors regularly killed the animals for their skins, teeth and claws. The author examines his struggle to understand the essence of “jaguarness,” a quality he admiringly sums up as fudoshin, the state of mind of the most advanced practitioners of Japanese martial arts. Once Rabinowitz grasped that there was only one species of jaguar, not the eight geographically separate subspecies heretofore recognized, he saw the importance of linking isolated groups into a single breeding population from Mexico to Argentina. His current conservation efforts are directed toward establishing a wildlife travel route between breeding populations to decrease the risk of extinction. Rabinowitz also discusses the Jaguar Corridor Initiative, which involves conservationists working cooperatively with governments, private landowners and developers to create a model of how conservation and development can coexist.
An irresistible account that will be of great interest to conservationists and may make cat lovers look at their pets’ behaviors with new eyes.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-59726-996-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Island Press
Review Posted Online: April 8, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 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
This is our life, these are our lighted seasons, and then we die. . . . In the meantime, in between time, we can see. . . we can work at making sense of (what) we see. . . to discover where we so incontrovertibly are. It's common sense; when you-move in, you try to learn the neighborhood." Dillard's "neighborhood" is hilly Virginia country where she lived alone, but essentially it is all those "shreds of creation" with which every human is surrounded, which she is trying to learn, to know — from finite variations to infinite possibilities of being and meaning. A tall order and Dillard doesn't quite fill it. She is too impatient to get about the soul's adventures to stay long with an egg-laying grasshopper, or other bits of flora and fauna, and her snatches from physics and biological/metaphysical studies are this side of frivolous. However, Ms. Dillard has a great deal going for her — in spite of some repetition of words and concepts, her prose is bright, fresh and occasionally emulates (not imitates) the Walden Master in a contemporary context: "Trees. . . extend impressively in both directions, . . . shearing rock and fanning air, doing their real business just out of reach." She has set herself no less a task than understanding emotionally, spiritually and intellectually the force of the creative extravagance of the universe in all its beauty and horhor ("There is a terrible innocence in the benumbed world of the lower animals, reducing life to a universal chomp.") Experience can be focused, and awareness sharpened, by a kind of meditative high. Thus this becomes somewhat exhausting reading, if taken in toto, but even if Dillard's reach exceeds her grasp, her sights are leagues higher than that of Anne Morrow Lindbergh's Gift from the Sea, regretfully (re her sex), the inevitable comparison.
Pub Date: March 13, 1974
ISBN: 0061233323
Page Count: -
Publisher: Harper's Magazine Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1974
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