Sparkling prose conveys an urgent message.
A joyous celebration of the music of life, from the acclaimed author of The Forest Unseen and The Songs of Trees.
Seamlessly melding history, ecology, physiology, philosophy, and biology, Haskell exults in the delightful cacophony created by birds and insects, wind and sea, human voices and musical instruments as he engages in the practice of “attentive listening” in his travels around the world. “Every vocal species,” he writes, “has a distinctive sound. Every place on the globe has an acoustic character made from the unique confluence of this multitude of voices.” This multitude of sound, though, is being threatened by noise pollution and habitat extinction, dire consequences of human behavior. Sound, Haskell reveals, is a fairly new development in the planet’s history, made possible by the manifestation, 1.5 billion years ago, of cilia, tiny hairs on the cell membrane that help cells move—and also, as in our own inner ears, to sense sonic vibrations. “For more than nine-tenths of its history, Earth lacked any communicative sounds,” writes the author. “No creatures sang when the seas first swarmed with animal life or when the ocean’s reefs first rose. The land’s primeval forests contained no calling insects or vertebrate animals.” Flowering plants ushered in life forms such as insects, which filled the air with trills and buzzes, and birds, for whom sound-making “mediates breeding, territoriality, and the alliances and tensions of animal social networks.” Haskell’s capacious purview includes the origins of musical instruments, some 40,000 years ago; the possibility that dinosaurs made low bugling sounds; the particular cries of birds living above the tree line; and the way sounds, including those made by humans, are adapted to environment and even shaped by diet. He mounts a compelling warning about “the silencing of ecosystems,” which “isolates individuals, fragments communities, and weakens the ecological resilience and evolutionary creativity of life.” Like “cultural knowledge,” Haskell asserts, “sound is unseen and ephemeral” and too precious to lose.
Sparkling prose conveys an urgent message.Pub Date: March 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-984881-54-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2022
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.
A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.
In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536131
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A charming, thoughtful pleasure for any animal lover.
A celebration of animal companions, mammalian, reptilian, avian, and otherwise.
The Ulysses S. Cat of NPR commentator Simon’s title was a “chunky orange Scottish Fold with endearing floppy ears and a broad, flat face that looked…as if he had been running full steam after a mouse when a door opened and…splat!” He may not have been the most photogenic of critters, but he was a steadfast companion to Simon’s mother and stepfather as the latter suffered illness and death. Other creatures populate Simon’s pages: a betta named Salman Fishdie, a grasshopper named Hoppy, many dogs and cats. Simon ranges widely to collect his stories; among the most affecting is a portrait of the people of Sarajevo under siege by Serbian forces, punctuated by an impatient colleague’s saying to Simon, “I do not want to get shot while doing a fucking pet story.” A good point, that, but Simon is emboldened and moved by the Sarajevans’ and U.N. soldiers’ care for pets displaced from their homes. “In making room for animals at the lowest times of their lives,” he writes, “Sarajevo showed the world real humanitarian aid.” In a somewhat lighter turn, Simon voices the hope that the afterlife will involve meeting again with all the animals and people we have loved, with no hard distinction drawn between birds, dogs, cats, turtles, and other beloved animal companions and other members of one’s family, biological and elective. While recognizing that animals make us better humans, holding unconditional love but eschewing grudges, Simon also decries the misuse of animals, particularly in laboratory settings where other modeling methods can be used that do not visit pain and death on such creatures as chimpanzees and white rats. Writes Simon, meaningfully, “Someday, I’m pretty sure we’ll look back on our use of animals in this way as something brutal.” Amen.
A charming, thoughtful pleasure for any animal lover.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781324117186
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
PERSPECTIVES
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