Flooding off these pages is a man who loves his life, brimming with curiosity and deeply respectful of the creatures and...
An intriguing and entertaining exploration into the things that runners can learn from animals.
Heinrich is best known for his studies of ravens in the Maine woods (The Mind of a Raven, 1999, etc.), but he is a crackerjack ultramarathoner as well as a deservedly award-winning nature writer. Here he taps into his research on the metabolism of animals, from bumblebees to camels, to glean some hints on how to improve his performance in an upcoming 100-kilometer race. First, he brings us back to his youth, where running was one of those pure and simple things that he could readily understand: the primal, unadorned joy of the movement. Like the monarch butterfly and the goose (for whom movement is “in their makeup. It is their way of coping”), running came naturally to Heinrich. As he traces his path to ultramarathoning, he brings readers up to speed with such running arcana as VO2 max, muscle fiber types, oxygen transport, and anaerobic energy burns. Then he turns his attention to specific animals and how they contend with economizing their energy: the power outputs of antelope, the prodigious aerobic pacing of frogs, why a camel protects itself from the sun, the smooth and efficient stride of the cockroach. He takes what he can from these and many more examples as he becomes “increasingly aware of my own breathing, heart rate, sweating, energy stores, stride, and running pace.” Heinrich delves into evolution to fashion his own training regime for the 100K race, which he relates in detail at the close of his account. And believe it, you’ll be pulling for him all the way.
Flooding off these pages is a man who loves his life, brimming with curiosity and deeply respectful of the creatures and environment around him. (Line drawings by the author)Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-06-019921-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2001
Not only the definitive life, but a tour de force by a master.
One of history’s most prolific inventors receives his due from one of the world’s greatest biographers.
Pulitzer and National Book Award winner Morris (This Living Hand and Other Essays, 2012, etc.), who died this year, agrees that Thomas Edison (1847-1931) almost certainly said, “genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration,” and few readers of this outstanding biography will doubt that he was the quintessential workaholic. Raised in a middle-class Michigan family, Edison displayed an obsessive entrepreneurial spirit from childhood. As an adolescent, he ran a thriving business selling food and newspapers on a local railroad. Learning Morse code, he spent the Civil War as a telegrapher, impressing colleagues with his speed and superiors with his ability to improve the equipment. In 1870, he opened his own shop to produce inventions to order. By 1876, he had money to build a large laboratory in New Jersey, possibly the world’s first industrial research facility. Never a loner, Edison hired talented people to assist him. The dazzling results included the first commercially successful light bulb for which, Morris reminds readers, he invented the entire system: dynamo, wires, transformers, connections, and switches. Critics proclaim that Edison’s innovations (motion pictures, fluoroscope, rechargeable batteries, mimeograph, etc.) were merely improvements on others’ work, but this is mostly a matter of sour grapes. Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone was a clunky, short-range device until it added Edison’s carbon microphone. And his phonograph flabbergasted everyone. Humans had been making images long before Daguerre, but no one had ever reproduced sound. Morris rivetingly describes the personalities, business details, and practical uses of Edison’s inventions as well as the massive technical details of years of research and trial and error for both his triumphs and his failures. For no obvious reason, the author writes in reverse chronological order, beginning in 1920, with each of the seven following chapters backtracking a decade. It may not satisfy all readers, but it works.
Not only the definitive life, but a tour de force by a master.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9311-0
Page Count: 800
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
A book that describes what kangaroos do and offers unusually beautiful pictures of them doing it. One old male bending forward while scratching his back looks like nothing else found in nature- -except maybe a curmudgeonly old baseball manager with arthritis in the late innings of another losing game (in fact, baseball players would appear to be the only animals who scratch themselves as much as kangaroos do—bellies, underarms, Iwago captures every permutation of scratching). At other times, they look preternaturally graceful and serene. Some of Iwago's (Mitsuaki Iwago's Whales, not reviewed) photographic compositions flirt with anthropomorphism and slyly play to our urge to see ourselves in the animals. But kangaroos are so singular that there's always something about the cant of a head or the drape of a limb that makes you think you flatter yourself that there is any kinship. They remain wondrously different.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-8118-0785-1
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
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