Beginning with a somewhat interesting history of ancient mythological love, Ackerman's (The Moon by Whalelight, 1991) book quickly degenerates into a regurgitation of stereotypes about differences between men and women. Love is, admittedly, a difficult concept to define, and Ackerman makes a reasonable effort by characterizing it as "the white light of emotion." Beginning with an enlightening exploration of ancient Egyptian, Greek, and Roman mythologies, she moves on to a discussion of modern love, arguing that it evolved with books and literacy. In discussing Greek romances between youths and older men, Ackerman indicates that homosexual love has a natural place in the history of love. But she later contradicts herself by speaking of the "biological ballet" of romantic love as evolution's way of ensuring that sexual partners meet and mate and procreate. Similarly, while she notes in her introduction that her discussion is restricted to love in the West, what follows appears to be an attempt at a generic description of love. Her not original "perpetuation of the genes" theory has little explanatory power for any differences in the ways men and women love today. At one point, she actually claims that male biology protests against demands for "new-age sensitive guys" because women are "trying to adapt them to a society for which they weren't designed." And it gets worse. Discussing the art of kissing, Ackerman cites anonymous anthropologists who tell us that "the lips remind us of the labia because they flush red and swell when aroused, which is the conscious or subconscious reason women have always made them look even redder with lipstick." Such functionalist arguments cannot be sustained without reputable citations. She should have called this a history of images of love within a few societies, rather than a "natural" history. Ackerman's essentialist notions of love will insult individuals who critically question traditional (and "natural") ways of anything, especially loving.
Pub Date: June 1, 1994
ISBN: 0679761837
Page Count: 373
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1994
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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