by Christopher White ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 5, 2018
A solid demonstration of why those who have a taste for lobster rolls better eat up while they can.
An environmental journalist turns in a somber story of vanishing fisheries and ways of life Down East.
Jumping aboard lobster boats and heading to sea, White (The Melting World: A Journey Across America’s Vanishing Glaciers, 2013, etc.) returns with an affecting report on the way humans have mismanaged marine resources. Economics is all about scarcity—and the scarcer the good in question, the more expensive it is likely to be. But in the case of the lobster, he writes, what looks to be a species in grave danger of disappearing has been overly abundant on the market, so much so that lobstermen had trouble selling their catches—which, in 2014, were six times the size of a normal year’s yield. Well, that’s the tragedy of the commons for you, or, as he puts it, “tragedy of the capitalists,” and, to trust White, it won’t continue for much longer. The supply will eventually dry up. The author examines the parallel story of the Atlantic bluefin tuna, an apex predator on the path to extinction thanks to overfishing. Some temporarily lucky lobstermen are able to extract huge numbers of shellfish from a sea fast warming and acidifying, while others, he writes, “are switching professions or moonlighting as truck drivers, telephone repairmen, and tollbooth attendants.” If there are a few stock characters in the narrative (“We’ll try to catch some lobstah—that’s my idear anyways,” says one veteran captain), there is also an obvious moral lesson: We have only so much influence over climate change at this late hour, but we must adjust our demands if food fisheries are to outlast the first half of the century. There are no shortcuts, for aquaculture doesn’t work for lobsters, and other species are dwindling alongside the crustaceans. “Does anyone ever learn from their neighbor or from the past?” White wonders. His answer is self-evident.
A solid demonstration of why those who have a taste for lobster rolls better eat up while they can.Pub Date: June 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-08085-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
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by Patrik Svensson translated by Agnes Broomé ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 5, 2020
Unsentimental nature writing that sheds as much light on humans as on eels.
An account of the mysterious life of eels that also serves as a meditation on consciousness, faith, time, light and darkness, and life and death.
In addition to an intriguing natural history, Swedish journalist Svensson includes a highly personal account of his relationship with his father. The author alternates eel-focused chapters with those about his father, a man obsessed with fishing for this elusive creature. “I can’t recall us ever talking about anything other than eels and how to best catch them, down there by the stream,” he writes. “I can’t remember us speaking at all….Because we were in…a place whose nature was best enjoyed in silence.” Throughout, Svensson, whose beat is not biology but art and culture, fills his account with people: Aristotle, who thought eels emerged live from mud, “like a slithering, enigmatic miracle”; Freud, who as a teenage biologist spent months in Trieste, Italy, peering through a microscope searching vainly for eel testes; Johannes Schmidt, who for two decades tracked thousands of eels, looking for their breeding grounds. After recounting the details of the eel life cycle, the author turns to the eel in literature—e.g., in the Bible, Rachel Carson’s Under the Sea Wind, and Günter Grass’ The Tin Drum—and history. He notes that the Puritans would likely not have survived without eels, and he explores Sweden’s “eel coast” (what it once was and how it has changed), how eel fishing became embroiled in the Northern Irish conflict, and the importance of eel fishing to the Basque separatist movement. The apparent return to life of a dead eel leads Svensson to a consideration of faith and the inherent message of miracles. He warns that if we are to save this fascinating creature from extinction, we must continue to study it. His book is a highly readable place to begin learning.
Unsentimental nature writing that sheds as much light on humans as on eels.Pub Date: May 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-296881-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 29, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
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by Brian Fies illustrated by Brian Fies ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 5, 2019
Drawings, words, and a few photos combine to convey the depth of a tragedy that would leave most people dumbstruck.
A new life and book arise from the ashes of a devastating California wildfire.
These days, it seems the fires will never end. They wreaked destruction over central California in the latter months of 2018, dominating headlines for weeks, barely a year after Fies (Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow?, 2009) lost nearly everything to the fires that raged through Northern California. The result is a vividly journalistic graphic narrative of resilience in the face of tragedy, an account of recent history that seems timely as ever. “A two-story house full of our lives was a two-foot heap of dead smoking ash,” writes the author about his first return to survey the damage. The matter-of-fact tone of the reportage makes some of the flights of creative imagination seem more extraordinary—particularly a nihilistic, two-page centerpiece of a psychological solar system in which “the fire is our black hole,” and “some veer too near and are drawn into despair, depression, divorce, even suicide,” while “others are gravitationally flung entirely out of our solar system to other cities or states, and never seen again.” Yet the stories that dominate the narrative are those of the survivors, who were part of the community and would be part of whatever community would be built to take its place across the charred landscape. Interspersed with the author’s own account are those from others, many retirees, some suffering from physical or mental afflictions. Each is rendered in a couple pages of text except one from a fellow cartoonist, who draws his own. The project began with an online comic when Fies did the only thing he could as his life was reduced to ash and rubble. More than 3 million readers saw it; this expanded version will hopefully extend its reach.
Drawings, words, and a few photos combine to convey the depth of a tragedy that would leave most people dumbstruck.Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4197-3585-1
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Abrams ComicArts
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
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