Few books are as relevant for our time as is this one.
A tree-hugger extraordinaire offers myriad compelling reasons to admire, revere and—yes—hug the nearest trunk.
Yet this is no soft, silly paean to treedom. English biologist Tudge (The Impact of the Gene, 2001, etc.) has synthesized volumes of research and presents his resulting work with humor, passion, even panache. He opens with a playful definition, “a tree is a big plant with a stick up the middle,” but soon we are deep into the roots of the subject, learning how trees evolved and how scientists continue to try to classify them. The longest, densest section is a 150-page tour of trees, beginning with the conifers and ending with the eudicots, but making instructive sojourns among the old, the tall, the wide and the weird. He describes one flowering tree whose warm blossoms invite beetles to spend the night and have sex; in the morning, covered with pollen, they depart to spread the tree’s DNA. The author does his best in these middle pages to thin the academic underbrush, but not always successfully. The brisk pace resumes in the final part; an especially strong chapter describes how trees live—for example, how water can rise from the roots of a redwood to its lofty top. Another fascinating section deals with the social life of trees (they’ve learned, unlike humans, how to get along . . . usually) and contains a dazzling set piece about the co-evolution of figs and the wasps that feed on them. The end dovetails nicely with Al Gore’s documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. Global warming threatens trees, which don’t adapt quickly to environmental change, and without them, our own once-arboreal species becomes much more vulnerable, Tudge writes. He urges prudent forestry, increased use of wood products for large buildings and a cold, sober reassessment of the global rush to industrialize.
Few books are as relevant for our time as is this one.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2006
ISBN: 1-4000-5036-7
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2006
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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