Provocative in the best sense: it gets the reader mad enough to care.
Strangely gratifying narratives never quite gel and yet stand ably and intriguingly on their own six feet: love story, natural-history lesson, mysticism, direct-action radical politics, xenotransplantation, and redemption.
Sea creatures are stranding themselves on the beaches of Oregon, causing no little pain to Isabel Spinner, forensic wildlife pathologist and lover of the ocean. From the evidence, she suspects foul play, likely something to do with Navy sonar experiments. Enter Marshall McGreggor, underwater photographer and friend of Isabel’s brother. Though both of them have hair to die for (she, “wild, kinky curls” of auburn, he, “unruly black hair too beautiful, thick, and curly for a man”—he also, ahem, works for National Geographic and is “as reliable as the weather”), their relationship is hardly combustible. They have too much emotional baggage for any lasting commitment—damaged goods, but near-perfect ones: gorgeous, talented, tuned to the music of the spheres. And he has the heart of a baboon—literally, having gotten it by transplant after a heart attack—which seems to give him out-of-body episodes that take him back to the African savannah and on a quest to find the matriarch of his clan. Yet, despite the often irritating, repining tone, Isabel and Marshall are appealing because of the ballast of their emotional disorders and the righteousness of their cause: to protect wildlife from the ravages of man. Novelist and memoirist Peterson (Build Me an Ark, 2001, etc.) is most comfortable in the precincts of natural history, where the book draws its passion. Though she can wear her learning like a wooden yoke (“ ‘Snow can’t melt on wolf’s fur,’ Isabel commented”), she writes with force and concision about poachers and the hugely destructive recklessness of military testing.
Provocative in the best sense: it gets the reader mad enough to care.Pub Date: March 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-57805-108-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2004
A vital, visually stunning photographic volume.
A conservationist and art photographer explores the erotic aspects of trees.
For more than 20 years, Arbor has been creating intimate photos of trees and people together. The humans, which include herself and others, are nearly always nude, and the folds and curves of their bodies harmonize with the sinew of the trees. In one, the author prostrates herself, as if on an altar, along a platform at the base of a 285-foot mountain ash; in others, she reclines on a willow that appears as though it’s bending to drink at a nearby pool or nestles in the crook of a windblown Cyprus, the curve of her back in perfect accord with the outermost bough’s lurch to the left. In one black-and-white photo, she molds herself to the basal furl of an enormous fig tree, pressing her palms and her cheek against its bark, looking like something from the pages of Ovid’s Metamorphosis. “For tens of thousands of years,” she writes, “people took refuge under trees, held council under trees, and depended upon trees for survival.” Indeed, from even earlier. Anyone perusing Arbor’s book can’t help but feel eerily reminded of humanity’s distant ancestors—the earliest hominids—and how some of them would have lived nearly their whole lives in the vanished oaks and beeches of the Pliocene (“we lived in kinship with them,” she achingly writes of that forgotten past). Sometimes the models’ fetal poses in the trees drift toward the sentimental, à la Anne Geddes’ work, and some readers may be amused by the fact that sometimes the models are difficult to locate, bringing to mind Where’s Waldo? But such levity isn’t unwelcome, and it serves only to intensify the fact that humans can appear eerily camouflaged in nature. Fortunately, Arbor has a remarkable eye for how light and shadow shape the viewer’s experience of texture, and some pictures are every bit as powerful and haunting as Edward Weston’s images of bell peppers—or, for that matter, of trees. Forest giants from Tasmania to South Africa to Anatolia have never seemed so alive.
A vital, visually stunning photographic volume.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-692-72604-4
Page Count: 200
Publisher: TreeGirl Studios LLC
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An Amish farmer's blissful account of the rhythms of nature and work, finding delight in everyday places. ``Sometimes I wonder whether I farm to make a living or whether it is all a front, just an excuse to be out in the fields looking at clouds,'' writes Kline (Great Possessions: An Amish Farmer's Journal, 1990), who works the farm in northwestern Ohio where he grew up. He's not a typical modern-day farmer: He plows with draft horses and uses chemical pesticides only as a last resort, and then reluctantly. His view of wildlife is more enlightened, too. He tolerates woodchucks (considered unredeemed pests by farmers dependent on expensive heavy equipment) because their burrows nurture foxes, rabbits, and other species. Kline organizes his observations into short, discursive essays that shift easily from farmstead to fields, woods, and the community. Though some early passages seem pedestrian (the section on spiders reads like an elementary science text), his observations of plants and animals grow more intriguing the farther from home he wanders. Kline's finest moments involve fascinating interactions with wildlife that show how attuned he is to nature. He observes a titmouse plucking fur for its nest from a sleeping raccoon's back, recalls a pet crow from childhood who liked to grip the hood ornaments of cars and go for a feather-ruffling ride, and stands stock still in a field until a weasel passes between his legs, close enough for Kline to observe drops of blood on its nose. He respects nature, and it rewards him with genuine oddities: A damselfly lays eggs on his finger; a napping woodchuck arches its back appreciatively when he scratches it with his walking stick. Though Kline's thoroughly charming survey of the natural world focuses on the flora and fauna indigenous to Ohio, it has much to teach us about appreciating wild things wherever we happen to be. (four illustrations, not seen) (Quality Paperback Book Club alternate selection)
Pub Date: Oct. 30, 1997
ISBN: 0-8203-1938-4
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Univ. of Georgia
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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