It is a rare and beautiful thing, Quammen's entertaining, challenging, and sustained brilliance. No wonder he needed a break...
The only downside to this collection of Quammen's (Wild Thoughts from Wild Places, 1997, etc.) natural history essays—and it is a painful one—is the reminder that he no longer writes them on a monthly basis.
Here is Quammen doing what he does like no other, knocking about in nature, one eye skinned for the curious organisms through which he explores big questions, the other on the lookout for a suitable opportunity to stick his finger in the eye of our speciesspecific complacency and selfdelusion. Like the cats (Felis sylvestris) he so admires, Quammen walks alone. He is an odd fellow, not selfconsciously so, but rather for the fresh and unexpected take he brings to such puzzles as ``what drives the evolution of bizarre forms of penis'' and ``does the female sea horse take foolish pride in the size of her thing''? Or why Tyrannosaurus rex ought to be the state bird of Montana. Or why two oneeyed poets are masters of the exigent art of seeing. Or what motivates the plague of defenestrated cats. Through such probings, improbable as it may seem, Quammen raises other grander questions—and infers a direction in which answers may lie—about the ``confusion of good logic and bad logic, earned emotion and specious emotion.'' If at times he pursues in his work ``a fascinating scientific question that might lend itself rather well to vulgarization and mockery,'' more often he discovers something jarring and demanding: ``a chimpanzee, confronting its own reflected image, is capable of selfrecognition. But humans look in a mirror and see only God.''
It is a rare and beautiful thing, Quammen's entertaining, challenging, and sustained brilliance. No wonder he needed a break from the monthly grind; it must have been like giving blood one too many times.Pub Date: April 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-684-83728-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2000
In a riveting account both beautiful and shocking, Bevis (English/Univ. of Montana) travels upriver in Borneo to witness the destruction of the world's oldest rain forests and one of the world's oldest cultures. Few Europeans, and fewer environmentalists, have traveled to Sarawak's interior to gain a firsthand understanding of how the Penan, the region's indigenous forest people, have fallen prey to a cabal of Japanese investors, Chinese-owned logging companies, and shortsighted, greedy, Malaysian bureaucrats. A gifted, modest, and fair-minded writer, Bevis befriends a young Penan and voyages up the Baram River by motorboat to meet with his people in their longhouses, as well as to visit Japanese-managed logging camps. He finds that the Penan are paid less than one-tenth of one percent of the gross proceeds from the destruction of their forests; that the unanimous verdict of the Malaysian government and of Japanese capitalists is that native people of Sarawak have no rights to their land; that while sustained yield for the forest is 8 million board-feet per year, 16 million board-feet are cut annually; and that the headmen of the longhouses are routinely bribed by Japanese managers to consent to their sections of forest being cut down. Lest readers regard this as a tragic but distant calamity, Bevis notes that Mitsubishi and other Japanese concerns are purchasing timber concessions in Canada and Brazil with the same voracious appetite displayed in Sarawak. Quite beyond this study of capitalist greed, however, Bevis displays a poetic naturalist's eye in describing the lush landscape and its welcoming people and provides interesting historical insights into the imperiled land. An absorbing, well-documented work that is of extreme and immediate relevance to both Third and First World peoples. (8 illustrations and maps, not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-295-97416-8
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Univ. of Washington
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1995
Environmental bad boy Chase (Playing God in Yellowstone, 1986, etc.) takes on biocentrism and the Endangered Species Act in this delightfully angry if at times snide volume. Pretty much from the word go, this country's responses to the environmental needs of the land have been inadequate, suggests Chase, but the currently voguish notion of ``ecosystems'' is egregious in the extreme. He traces the roots of this concept back to its holistic/monistic source: It reflects the long line of thinking from ``Puritans longing for salvation through intimacy with God in nature'' right up to the preservationists' notion of nature as self-regulator (a particular bugbear of Chase's). Quaint ideas, scolds the author, unscientific and full of gaping holes. Nature is everywhere in flux; our yearning to return to presettlement conditions shows us up as ``self-interested primitivists infatuated with the aesthetic features of climax communities.'' Our desire to protect threatened creatures via the Endangered Species Act is an absurd ``mandate to stop evolution.'' Nature chooses no favorites, extinctions are inevitable, so why ``set aside for a Disneyesque menagerie of obscure life forms'' entire regions of the US?particularly in the Pacific Northwest, where the fight to save old-growth forests serves as the book's framework. Though diatribe is Chase's forte, he's willing to put himself on the line with some recommendations for those involved in the environmental issue: Embrace change, work in concert rather than as adversaries, remember that humans too are an element in the landscape (and their works often very pleasing), and understand that the diversity of landscapes demands differing environmental strategies to reflect not just the land but the variegated interests of a heterogeneous society. Not for everyone this bitter medicine, devoid as it is of mystery and charm, but it is fascinating reading, impeccably researched, and powerful in that Chase is clearly a friend of the Earth, not another glad-tider or apologist. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 27, 1995
ISBN: 0-395-60837-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1995
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