A heartfelt call for compassion for all living species.
Why bonding with animals makes us better human beings.
Neurologist Akhtar (Animals and Public Health, 2012), deputy director of the Army’s Traumatic Brain Injury Program and a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Public Health Service, makes an impassioned and moving argument that empathy with animals deeply affects humans’ health. Drawing on interviews with a wide range of individuals, including prisoners, a serial killer, a vegetarian chicken farmer, animal researchers, and victims of PTSD; scientific studies; and her own experience as a sexually abused and bullied young girl who bonded with an abused dog, the author examines the physical, emotional, and psychological responses that occur when humans connect with any animal, not only common house pets. Animals, she writes, “calm us by lowering our blood pressure, heart rate, and stress hormones. We relax with animals” because they “defuse a lot of the human-generated pressure in our lives.” The beneficial response, one psychologist suggests, comes from the release of oxytocin, a hormone that “increases social interaction, generosity, bonding, and attachment. It also improves trust and decreases aggression, fear, and hyperarousal.” Many organizations, writes Akhtar, promote human-animal connection, such as K9s for Warriors, a nonprofit group that “pairs dogs with military veterans who have PTSD”; Feeding Pets of the Homeless; Rowdy Girl Sanctuary, which rescues farm animals; and FORWARD, an organization that establishes cat sanctuaries in prisons, where inmates care for and socialize abandoned or abused cats. The cats, Akhtar notes, “provide the only physical contact and affection many of the inmates receive.” The author’s research uncovers much animal cruelty at the hands of individuals and in the livestock industry, which she describes in sickening detail. “It is the same mind-set that encourages cruelty toward animals and toward other humans,” she asserts, whereas empathy encourages kindness: “Animals remind us that the world is larger than us. They can teach us to look beyond the racism, poverty, and cruelty in our lives.” A brief appendix offers readers suggestions for positive change.
A heartfelt call for compassion for all living species.Pub Date: May 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64313-070-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.
A study of swimming as sport, survival method, basis for community, and route to physical and mental well-being.
For Bay Area writer Tsui (American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods, 2009), swimming is in her blood. As she recounts, her parents met in a Hong Kong swimming pool, and she often visited the beach as a child and competed on a swim team in high school. Midway through the engaging narrative, the author explains how she rejoined the team at age 40, just as her 6-year-old was signing up for the first time. Chronicling her interviews with scientists and swimmers alike, Tsui notes the many health benefits of swimming, some of which are mental. Swimmers often achieve the “flow” state and get their best ideas while in the water. Her travels took her from the California coast, where she dove for abalone and swam from Alcatraz back to San Francisco, to Tokyo, where she heard about the “samurai swimming” martial arts tradition. In Iceland, she met Guðlaugur Friðþórsson, a local celebrity who, in 1984, survived six hours in a winter sea after his fishing vessel capsized, earning him the nickname “the human seal.” Although humans are generally adapted to life on land, the author discovered that some have extra advantages in the water. The Bajau people of Indonesia, for instance, can do 10-minute free dives while hunting because their spleens are 50% larger than average. For most, though, it’s simply a matter of practice. Tsui discussed swimming with Dara Torres, who became the oldest Olympic swimmer at age 41, and swam with Kim Chambers, one of the few people to complete the daunting Oceans Seven marathon swim challenge. Drawing on personal experience, history, biology, and social science, the author conveys the appeal of “an unflinching giving-over to an element” and makes a convincing case for broader access to swimming education (372,000 people still drown annually).
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61620-786-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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
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