A diverting excursion through the coop and beyond.
Part-time Pennsylvania farmer and full-time Philadelphia Inquirer editor Sheasley combines firsthand experience and wide-ranging research in his treasury of chicken lore.
Every morning, the author carefully carries a basket of his chickens’ eggs with him to sell to his co-workers at the newspaper, a fact that neatly encapsulates his double life as word man and egg man. The word man has neatly organized this potpourri into four parts based on the seasons of the year, prefacing each with an imaginary conversation with Ulisse Aldrovandi, a charming 16th-century Italian scholar and naturalist whose writings on chickens combine fact and fable. Each of the four parts is further divided into essays on a variety of chicken-related topics. Thus, under “Spring” Sheasley writes of building his own chicken coop, of myths and rituals involving chickens, of the domestication of chickens and their spread around the world and of differences in the ways the poultry industry and the backyard farmer raise chickens. He proudly describes the breeds he’s nurturing: Golden-Spangled Hamburgs, Wyandottes, Egyptian Fayoumis and Blue Cochins. The decimation of that flock, probably by a skunk, is sudden and shocking. Pecking order in a brood, the sex life of roosters, how an egg develops, the perils of avian flu, the meaning of “free-range” and “organic”—anything related to chickens engages Sheasley. Mike, who made it into The Guinness Book of World Records by living for 18 months after his head was cut off, and Lily, a chicken that played tic-tac-toe with humans and usually won, are among the notable chickens receiving special mention. Sheasley closely observes the behavior and tribulations of his own brood—Tim turned broody; Rosie and Blue struggled with their places in the pecking order—and boasts about the wondrous lavender, green and even black shells of the golden-yolked, hormone-free eggs they lay.
A diverting excursion through the coop and beyond.Pub Date: July 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-312-37364-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2008
Whether you call this a personal story or nature writing, it’s poignant, thoughtful and moving—and likely to become a...
An inspired, beautiful and absorbing account of a woman battling grief—with a goshawk.
Following the sudden death of her father, Macdonald (History and Philosophy/Cambridge Univ.; Falcon, 2006, etc.) tried staving off deep depression with a unique form of personal therapy: the purchase and training of an English goshawk, which she named Mabel. Although a trained falconer, the author chose a raptor both unfamiliar and unpredictable, a creature of mad confidence that became a means of working against madness. “The hawk was everything I wanted to be: solitary, self-possessed, free from grief, and numb to the hurts of human life,” she writes. As a devotee of birds of prey since girlhood, Macdonald knew the legends and the literature, particularly the cautionary example of The Once and Future King author T.H. White, whose 1951 book The Goshawk details his own painful battle to master his title subject. Macdonald dramatically parallels her own story with White’s, achieving a remarkable imaginative sympathy with the writer, a lonely, tormented homosexual fighting his own sadomasochistic demons. Even as she was learning from White’s mistakes, she found herself very much in his shoes, watching her life fall apart as the painfully slow bonding process with Mabel took over. Just how much do animals and humans have in common? The more Macdonald got to know her, the more Mabel confounded her notions about what the species was supposed to represent. Is a hawk a symbol of might or independence, or is that just our attempt to remake the animal world in our own image? Writing with breathless urgency that only rarely skirts the melodramatic, Macdonald broadens her scope well beyond herself to focus on the antagonism between people and the environment.
Whether you call this a personal story or nature writing, it’s poignant, thoughtful and moving—and likely to become a classic in either genre.Pub Date: March 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0802123411
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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