A charming, well-written introduction to coral-reef ecology and the scientists who uncover its mysteries.
A leading ocean scientist examines the mostly bad news concerning the health of the world’s coral reefs in a blend of polemic and memoir.
Roberts, a winner of the Rachel Carson Award and the Mountbatten Award, has been a student of marine biology for more than four decades. “When I began my career as a marine biologist,” he writes, “we knew little about this hidden world.” About the object of his specialized study, he adds, “but as we have come to know coral reefs with ever greater intimacy, we have learned that this world is fragile and increasingly endangered, by us.” The author begins in 1982 with his explorations of the reefs of the Red Sea as a student surrounded by a motley collection of scientists, including a field manager Roberts describes as “a whip-thin bundle of nervous energy.” The oddball types are constants of the field, but knowledge of the oceans has increased considerably during the author’s career. As for the fish—well, he reveals that “an old ichthyological adage says that the average fish lives ten minutes, given the billions of eggs spawned and the miniscule number that make it to adulthood.” A healthy population of seaweed-munching fish is critically important to the health of a reef, and, all things being connected to all other things, the overfishing of reef dwellers means a decline in reefs. In the author’s words, “it is the high intensity of reef herbivory that keeps reefs coral-dominated.” Roberts examines failing reef systems such as those in the Caribbean and particularly the Great Barrier Reef off Australia. Can they be saved? Yes, answers the author, but only if we give up fossil fuels and “embrace renewables with great urgency,” which means that the answer is likely really no.
A charming, well-written introduction to coral-reef ecology and the scientists who uncover its mysteries.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64313-329-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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