A bit narrow, but worth the read if the topic appeals.
The story of a town in northeast British Columbia that came together to rescue two horses trapped on a mountain’s snowy summit.
With co-author Scanlan (The Horse God Built: The Untold Story of Secretariat, the World's Greatest Racehorse, 2007), horse trainer and riding instructor Stutz opens with a kind of fairy-tale tone that hints at sublime imagery, suspense and creatively drawn characters. Despite sincere, balanced efforts by the author, the story—while impressive and inspiring—ultimately fails to deliver on these literary counts. Still, there is certainly something here for animal lovers and those for whom life in the Canadian Rockies is either familiar or of interest. In September 2008, a lawyer from Edmonton took his two pack horses, Belle and Sundance, up Mt. Renshaw to deliver supplies to a friend hiking there. When the weather turned foul, he made a wrong turn and led the horses through two treacherous bogs, after which they refused to follow him. Figuring the horses would come down the mountain when they were ready, he abandoned them and headed for the valley, not to find them again for 12 weeks. By mid-December, “the verdant mountain meadows…gradually transformed into…a cold, white prison” for Belle and Sundance. The owner determined them too weak to make it through the deep snow, and decided to “let nature take its course,” a decision for which he would later be charged with animal cruelty. Meanwhile, snowmobilers had spread the word around a nearby town that two emaciated horses were trapped at Renshaw summit. After ruling out euthanasia due to the glimmers in Belle and Sundance’s eyes, the locals mobilized in a collective act of community spirit to orchestrate a rescue attempt. Over seven days, they dug a “tunnel to freedom” to lead the horses down the mountain to the logging road nearly 20 miles away, and eventually to health on separate ranches in the region. Stutz emerged as the lead horse handler and spokesperson for the effort.
A bit narrow, but worth the read if the topic appeals.Pub Date: March 15, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-306-82097-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Merloyd Lawrence/Da Capo
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2012
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
Unsentimental nature writing that sheds as much light on humans as on eels.
An account of the mysterious life of eels that also serves as a meditation on consciousness, faith, time, light and darkness, and life and death.
In addition to an intriguing natural history, Swedish journalist Svensson includes a highly personal account of his relationship with his father. The author alternates eel-focused chapters with those about his father, a man obsessed with fishing for this elusive creature. “I can’t recall us ever talking about anything other than eels and how to best catch them, down there by the stream,” he writes. “I can’t remember us speaking at all….Because we were in…a place whose nature was best enjoyed in silence.” Throughout, Svensson, whose beat is not biology but art and culture, fills his account with people: Aristotle, who thought eels emerged live from mud, “like a slithering, enigmatic miracle”; Freud, who as a teenage biologist spent months in Trieste, Italy, peering through a microscope searching vainly for eel testes; Johannes Schmidt, who for two decades tracked thousands of eels, looking for their breeding grounds. After recounting the details of the eel life cycle, the author turns to the eel in literature—e.g., in the Bible, Rachel Carson’s Under the Sea Wind, and Günter Grass’ The Tin Drum—and history. He notes that the Puritans would likely not have survived without eels, and he explores Sweden’s “eel coast” (what it once was and how it has changed), how eel fishing became embroiled in the Northern Irish conflict, and the importance of eel fishing to the Basque separatist movement. The apparent return to life of a dead eel leads Svensson to a consideration of faith and the inherent message of miracles. He warns that if we are to save this fascinating creature from extinction, we must continue to study it. His book is a highly readable place to begin learning.
Unsentimental nature writing that sheds as much light on humans as on eels.Pub Date: May 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-296881-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 29, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
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