Despite tedious forays into the politics of research grants, newcomer Wohlforth offers a revealing look at climate change...
A journalist and native Alaskan comes to grips with the impact of climate change in an Arctic region where science predicted it would first show its hand.
Wohlforth delves into the two disparate cultures most affected by the steady warming that he asserts “everybody in Alaska knows is a fact.” While the Iñupiaq Eskimos embark on increasingly perilous whale hunts, scientific researchers struggle against the elements in order to amass data that might unlock a view of the future. The author, a sometime outdoor trekker, is at his descriptive best when accompanying native hunters out onto sea ice in search of the migrating Bowhead whales that support their subsistence tradition. Wind, wave, and mysterious puddles of brine can conspire to cause sudden fractures, sending hunters scurrying frantically for shore (often tens of miles away) towing sledges, boats, and massive amounts of butchered whale meat with their snowmobiles. As warmed air generates fog—now more than ever an added threat—any wrong turn can lead to a watery death, or a lonely one on a shrinking floe far at sea where the likeliest companion is a hungry polar bear. Wohlforth’s prime inquiry: What can these imperiled people, who have intimately studied climate for generations, share with formal science to help answer the big questions? First, you have to get scientists to listen, the author explains, and that can be a tough job if they would rather be out collecting core samples from snowbanks or sea ice in wintertime. One anecdotal gem involves an Iñupiaq known for uncannily accurate weather predictions who is initially thought by scientists to use some form of meditation; they later find out that he unerringly takes to his tent to hear the morning forecast from KBAR radio.
Despite tedious forays into the politics of research grants, newcomer Wohlforth offers a revealing look at climate change where it counts.Pub Date: April 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-86547-659-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: North Point/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2004
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
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
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