A very tall tale about a very big bird.
Verhines, a veteran truck driver, relates his encounter with a gigantic, mysterious bird.
In July 2018, the author was driving his rig in Pennsylvania near sunset when he saw the enormous bird. In his initial reaction, recorded for the Pennsylvania Game Commission, he stated that it was a larger-than-average bird. He subsequently revised this estimate upward after both watching an episode of MonsterQuest, a TV show, about giant birds and receiving the exact measurements of “his” thunderbird from God in a prophetic vision. His new estimates are staggering: In this book, he claims the creature he saw in Pennsylvania was 50 feet long with a wingspan of 220 feet (twice as long as an adult blue whale), individual feathers as long as 20 feet, and a possible weight of 2,000 pounds, although he suggests it could be as high as 25,000 pounds (twice as heavy as an adult African elephant). “Its wings and body broke through the sky with such a force that I thought I saw it pushing the air,” he writes. “My guess is that it was dive-bombing me at about 150 miles an hour.” Verhines moves from the account of his own sighting to an overview of other “thunderbird” sightings and to a summary of the whole concept of “cryptozoology,” the practice of theorizing about large, undiscovered animals. But he likewise admits that his primary fact-verification process is religious. “When I want to rivet something down in truth,” he writes, “I use Bible verses or Bible ideas to ground my approach.” He writes about large birds like condors and extinct avian dinosaurs like pterosaurs, but since there is no possibility that an animal the size he describes (much less a breeding population of them) could exist, his digressions on history and speculative biology, however entertainingly written, will likely be dismissed by all but the most zealous cryptozoologists.
A very tall tale about a very big bird.Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-97-722436-1
Page Count: 286
Publisher: Outskirts Press
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.
In which the veteran humorist enters middle age with fine snark but some trepidation as well.
Mortality is weighing on Sedaris (Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, 2017, etc.), much of it his own, professional narcissist that he is. Watching an elderly man have a bowel accident on a plane, he dreaded the day when he would be the target of teenagers’ jokes “as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind.” A skin tumor troubled him, but so did the doctor who told him he couldn’t keep it once it was removed. “But it’s my tumor,” he insisted. “I made it.” (Eventually, he found a semitrained doctor to remove and give him the lipoma, which he proceeded to feed to a turtle.) The deaths of others are much on the author’s mind as well: He contemplates the suicide of his sister Tiffany, his alcoholic mother’s death, and his cantankerous father’s erratic behavior. His contemplation of his mother’s drinking—and his family’s denial of it—makes for some of the most poignant writing in the book: The sound of her putting ice in a rocks glass increasingly sounded “like a trigger being cocked.” Despite the gloom, however, frivolity still abides in the Sedaris clan. His summer home on the Carolina coast, which he dubbed the Sea Section, overspills with irreverent bantering between him and his siblings as his long-suffering partner, Hugh, looks on. Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters. For example, cashiers who say “have a blessed day” make him feel “like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.” But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals.
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
PROFILES
The book is not entirely negative; final chapters indicate roads of reversal, before it is too late!
It should come as no surprise that the gifted author of The Sea Around Usand its successors can take another branch of science—that phase of biology indicated by the term ecology—and bring it so sharply into focus that any intelligent layman can understand what she is talking about.
Understand, yes, and shudder, for she has drawn a living portrait of what is happening to this balance nature has decreed in the science of life—and what man is doing (and has done) to destroy it and create a science of death. Death to our birds, to fish, to wild creatures of the woods—and, to a degree as yet undetermined, to man himself. World War II hastened the program by releasing lethal chemicals for destruction of insects that threatened man’s health and comfort, vegetation that needed quick disposal. The war against insects had been under way before, but the methods were relatively harmless to other than the insects under attack; the products non-chemical, sometimes even introduction of other insects, enemies of the ones under attack. But with chemicals—increasingly stronger, more potent, more varied, more dangerous—new chain reactions have set in. And ironically, the insects are winning the war, setting up immunities, and re-emerging, their natural enemies destroyed. The peril does not stop here. Waters, even to the underground water tables, are contaminated; soils are poisoned. The birds consume the poisons in their insect and earthworm diet; the cattle, in their fodder; the fish, in the waters and the food those waters provide. And humans? They drink the milk, eat the vegetables, the fish, the poultry. There is enough evidence to point to the far-reaching effects; but this is only the beginning,—in cancer, in liver disorders, in radiation perils…This is the horrifying story. It needed to be told—and by a scientist with a rare gift of communication and an overwhelming sense of responsibility. Already the articles taken from the book for publication in The New Yorkerare being widely discussed. Book-of-the-Month distribution in October will spread the message yet more widely.
The book is not entirely negative; final chapters indicate roads of reversal, before it is too late!Pub Date: Sept. 27, 1962
ISBN: 061825305X
Page Count: 378
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1962
APPRECIATIONS
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