What Toomey most neatly taps into is that strange moment in time when storm-hunting made sense, when a few years earlier...
A sturdy revivification of one star-crossed hurricane-hunting mission by Navy fliers, plus a more general (and more gratifying) history of hurricanes.
As Toomey (Amelia Earhart's Daughters, 1998) sketches it out for readers, the post-WWII period was the first time that it was possible to make aerial reconnaissance of violent weather, thanks to the wealth of trained pilots and advances in technology. These were the Hurricane Hunters, and in their 30-year history, only one plane was lost. Toomey weaves the story of that crew's final flight throughout this narrative, but it fails to prompt much excitement, mainly because Toomey has refused to take any creative liberties with the flight—it is not known what happened to the plane, whether wind shear or downdraft or flooded engines caused it to crash—and his conjectures are kept to a few terse pages. Vest-pocket biographies of the fliers aren't enough to provoke much human interest, either. What keeps the story afloat are descriptions of the gathering storm—Hurricane Janet, with monster winds—and a broad look at hurricanes through history. Toomey charts the early research and then closely follows all the academic beard-pulling of the following decades over the nature of hurricanes. The storm work of Robert Hare, William Redfield, Vilhelm Bjerknes, and Lewis Richardson is handily covered, though Toomey occasionally gets in over his head, as in brief forays into the nature of turbulence and fluid dynamics. Finally, we still know little about the storms: Questions both small (why the air in the eye is warmer than the air in the surrounding clouds) and large (the nature of the interactions among the storm's components) still confound meteorologists.
What Toomey most neatly taps into is that strange moment in time when storm-hunting made sense, when a few years earlier such missions would have been logistically and technologically impossible, and a few years later advances in technology would make such flights, at the least, quixotic. (16 pages of photographs)Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-393-02000-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
Ackerman writes with a light but assured touch, her prose rich in fact but economical in delivering it. Fans of birds in all...
Science writer Ackerman (Ah-Choo!: The Uncommon Life of Your Common Cold, 2010, etc.) looks at the new science surrounding avian intelligence.
The takeaway: calling someone a birdbrain is a compliment. And in any event, as Ackerman observes early on, “intelligence is a slippery concept, even in our own species, tricky to define and tricky to measure.” Is a bird that uses a rock to break open a clamshell the mental equivalent of a tool-using primate? Perhaps that’s the wrong question, for birds are so unlike humans that “it’s difficult for us to fully appreciate their mental capabilities,” given that they’re really just small, feathered dinosaurs who inhabit a wholly different world from our once-arboreal and now terrestrial one. Crows and other corvids have gotten all the good publicity related to bird intelligence in recent years, but Ackerman, who does allow that some birds are brighter than others, points favorably to the much-despised pigeon as an animal that “can remember hundreds of different objects for long periods of time, discriminate between different painting styles, and figure out where it’s going, even when displaced from familiar territory by hundreds of miles.” Not bad for a critter best known for bespattering statues in public parks. Ackerman travels far afield to places such as Barbados and New Caledonia to study such matters as memory, communication, and decision-making, the last largely based on visual cues—though, as she notes, birds also draw ably on other senses, including smell, which in turn opens up insight onto “a weird evolutionary paradox that scientists have puzzled over for more than a decade”—a matter of the geometry of, yes, the bird brain.
Ackerman writes with a light but assured touch, her prose rich in fact but economical in delivering it. Fans of birds in all their diversity will want to read this one.Pub Date: April 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59420-521-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
In these insightfully droll essays, Gierach shows us how fishing offers plenty of time to think things over.
The latest collection of interrelated essays by the veteran fishing writer.
As in his previous books—from The View From Rat Lake through All Fishermen Are Liars—Gierach hones in on the ups and downs of fishing, and those looking for how-to tips will find plenty here on rods, flies, guides, streams, and pretty much everything else that informs the fishing life. It is the everything else that has earned Gierach the following of fellow writers and legions of readers who may not even fish but are drawn to his musings on community, culture, the natural world, and the seasons of life. In one representatively poetic passage, he writes, “it was a chilly fall afternoon with the leaves changing, the current whispering, and a pale moon in a daytime sky. The river seemed inscrutable, but alive with possibility.” Gierach writes about both patience and process, and he describes the long spells between catches as the fisherman’s equivalent of writer’s block. Even when catching fish is the point, it almost seems beside the point (anglers will understand that sentiment): At the end of one essay, he writes, “I was cold, bored, hungry, and fishless, but there was still nowhere else I’d have rather been—something anyone who fishes will understand.” Most readers will be profoundly moved by the meditation on mortality within the blandly titled “Up in Michigan,” a character study of a man dying of cancer. Though the author had known and been fishing with him for three decades, his reticence kept anyone from knowing him too well. Still, writes Gierach, “I came to think of [his] glancing pronouncements as Michigan haiku: brief, no more than obliquely revealing, and oddly beautiful.” Ultimately, the man was focused on settling accounts, getting in one last fishing trip, and then planning to “sit in the sun and think things over until it’s time for hospice.”
In these insightfully droll essays, Gierach shows us how fishing offers plenty of time to think things over.Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6858-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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