Certainly not the happiest of lives, though it makes an irresistible story rich with idiosyncrasy—not to mention all those...
An affecting story of a son’s efforts to understand his father’s obsession with bird listing—as well as a pleasurable journey through the astonishing world of birders who measure their counts in the thousands.
It all started in 1974, in Queens, with a brown thrasher. The author’s father, then 11 years old, was inexplicably smitten. Richard Koeppel would go on from there to tally more than 7,000 species. His family suffered from his abstraction, but it would be unfair to blame the birds, for Richard was a withdrawn man with demons from his childhood. His marriage ended in divorce when his son was quite young, and that in turn bestowed upon Dan his own demons. But the first-time author does not invite our pity, even though his writing is brushed with sorrow; indeed, readers will admire his courage in keeping after his father and take pleasure in the heart-gladdening connection they have made over the past few years. Although Dan never really puts a finger squarely on Richard’s birding mania (somehow, the comment that “it’s all about the numbers” doesn’t fill the bill), he does explore a few possibilities. The thirst for gaining perspective on our place in the world drives some birders, since the sheer number of species makes one think long and hard about evolution and the complexity of ecosystems, and of course birding is a good place to hide from life’s many miseries. In addition, the author recounts with descriptive ease trips he took with his father to bird—pretty interesting, once he got past the point where his father looked at birds and he looked at his father. Among his vest-pocket biographies of legendary listers, especially good are those of the few who traced a Zen-like evolution from looker to lister to purely curious, a state of combined emptiness and fullness.
Certainly not the happiest of lives, though it makes an irresistible story rich with idiosyncrasy—not to mention all those glorious birds.Pub Date: May 5, 2005
ISBN: 1-59463-001-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Hudson Street/Penguin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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