Though with some overlap with the existing literature, a useful survey of the current state of all matters lupine.
Blending solid history with on-the-ground reportage, natural history writer Peterson (Wolf Haven: Sanctuary and the Future of Wolves in North America, 2016, etc.) turns in a spirited defense of Canis lupus.
The war on wolves is an ancient one. In the American West, where the author lives, ranchers fear wolves for their supposedly ravenous, profit-reducing hunger; elsewhere, wolves have been made into fairy-tale monsters. Against such clichés, Peterson serves up a few of her own, including the old saw about superior Native American wisdom in asking, “who speaks for wolf?” and the rather obvious nostrum, “to declare a person or an animal an enemy requires dehumanizing the other.” Much of the spiritual ground, so to speak, that she covers has already been explored in better books by Barry Lopez and Peter Matthiessen, while Thomas McNamee and Rick McIntyre (who makes an appearance here) have done more comprehensive work in studying the fate of the wolf population of Yellowstone National Park. Yet, while she does not surpass them, Peterson adds important information, including her account of the recently articulated mechanisms of “trophic cascades,” by which wolves are seen to have large implications for the health of wild ecosystems. “We are just beginning to understand wolf biology,” she writes before examining some of those implications as they center on the fate of one fallen wolf. Often, Peterson’s passing observations are as useful as the data she presents on wolves themselves. For instance, she notes, hopefully, that the millennial generation, though not identifying as “environmentalists” strictly speaking, are “the most environmental generation ever,” supporting clean energy, strong regulatory programs, wilderness protection, and, yes, wolf reintroduction. There are other good takeaways here as well, including a lively discussion of why wolves howl and what kind of “vocabularies” they employ when doing so.
Though with some overlap with the existing literature, a useful survey of the current state of all matters lupine.Pub Date: May 2, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-306-82493-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
This is our life, these are our lighted seasons, and then we die. . . . In the meantime, in between time, we can see. . . we can work at making sense of (what) we see. . . to discover where we so incontrovertibly are. It's common sense; when you-move in, you try to learn the neighborhood." Dillard's "neighborhood" is hilly Virginia country where she lived alone, but essentially it is all those "shreds of creation" with which every human is surrounded, which she is trying to learn, to know — from finite variations to infinite possibilities of being and meaning. A tall order and Dillard doesn't quite fill it. She is too impatient to get about the soul's adventures to stay long with an egg-laying grasshopper, or other bits of flora and fauna, and her snatches from physics and biological/metaphysical studies are this side of frivolous. However, Ms. Dillard has a great deal going for her — in spite of some repetition of words and concepts, her prose is bright, fresh and occasionally emulates (not imitates) the Walden Master in a contemporary context: "Trees. . . extend impressively in both directions, . . . shearing rock and fanning air, doing their real business just out of reach." She has set herself no less a task than understanding emotionally, spiritually and intellectually the force of the creative extravagance of the universe in all its beauty and horhor ("There is a terrible innocence in the benumbed world of the lower animals, reducing life to a universal chomp.") Experience can be focused, and awareness sharpened, by a kind of meditative high. Thus this becomes somewhat exhausting reading, if taken in toto, but even if Dillard's reach exceeds her grasp, her sights are leagues higher than that of Anne Morrow Lindbergh's Gift from the Sea, regretfully (re her sex), the inevitable comparison.
Pub Date: March 13, 1974
ISBN: 0061233323
Page Count: -
Publisher: Harper's Magazine Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1974
IN THE NEWS
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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