Greenbaum’s enthusiasm for his work shines through, as does his compelling message about the future of our planet.
An intrepid herpetologist’s account of his grueling collection-based forays into the Congo.
For Greenbaum (Evolutionary Genetics/Univ. of Texas, El Paso), who has faced the extraordinary challenges of conducting biodiversity exploration in the Congo Basin, the next challenge is educating the general public about its importance. In his foreboding words, “if the public does not understand biodiversity science, then continuing mass extinction, including the human species, is inevitable.” The author’s first book is not just packed with high adventures; it also contains meditations on gorillas, conservation, the global ecosystem, climate change, and mass extinctions. Readers will learn how a herpetologist works in the wild and why finding and identifying species is so important. Greenbaum tells of his two 10-week expeditions in 2008 and 2009 inside the war-torn Democratic Republic of the Congo, which he calls “the holy grail of unknown biodiversity in Africa.” With a team of Congolese helpers, he carried on his collecting work in tropical forests, on mountainsides, and in swamps while suffering debilitating illnesses, coping with breakdowns, paying bribes, and encountering armed militia. “For centuries,” he writes, “Central Africa has been a paradoxical combination of mystery, danger, and exotic allure” and a rumored source of both “amazing riches” and “rumors of certain death.” Despite setbacks, the author happily plunged into his work of collecting, identifying, and preserving frogs, lizards, skinks, snakes, chameleons, and other reptiles. He includes photos of many of these animals, his band of helpers, the people they met, the lands they traveled through, and even their expedition truck mired in deep mud. The small maps are not especially helpful, but the narrative is smooth and engaging, effectively showing the natural wonder of the Congo—and its fragility.
Greenbaum’s enthusiasm for his work shines through, as does his compelling message about the future of our planet.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5126-0097-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: ForeEdge/Univ. Press of New England
Review Posted Online: Sept. 11, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
Drawings, words, and a few photos combine to convey the depth of a tragedy that would leave most people dumbstruck.
A new life and book arise from the ashes of a devastating California wildfire.
These days, it seems the fires will never end. They wreaked destruction over central California in the latter months of 2018, dominating headlines for weeks, barely a year after Fies (Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow?, 2009) lost nearly everything to the fires that raged through Northern California. The result is a vividly journalistic graphic narrative of resilience in the face of tragedy, an account of recent history that seems timely as ever. “A two-story house full of our lives was a two-foot heap of dead smoking ash,” writes the author about his first return to survey the damage. The matter-of-fact tone of the reportage makes some of the flights of creative imagination seem more extraordinary—particularly a nihilistic, two-page centerpiece of a psychological solar system in which “the fire is our black hole,” and “some veer too near and are drawn into despair, depression, divorce, even suicide,” while “others are gravitationally flung entirely out of our solar system to other cities or states, and never seen again.” Yet the stories that dominate the narrative are those of the survivors, who were part of the community and would be part of whatever community would be built to take its place across the charred landscape. Interspersed with the author’s own account are those from others, many retirees, some suffering from physical or mental afflictions. Each is rendered in a couple pages of text except one from a fellow cartoonist, who draws his own. The project began with an online comic when Fies did the only thing he could as his life was reduced to ash and rubble. More than 3 million readers saw it; this expanded version will hopefully extend its reach.
Drawings, words, and a few photos combine to convey the depth of a tragedy that would leave most people dumbstruck.Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4197-3585-1
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Abrams ComicArts
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
Exemplary writing about the world and a welcome gift to readers.
Distinguished natural history writer and explorer Lopez (Outside, 2014, etc.) builds a winning memoir around books, voyages, and biological and anthropological observations.
“Traveling, despite the technological innovations that have brought cultural homogenization to much of the world, helps the curious and attentive itinerant understand how deep the notion goes that one place is never actually like another.” So writes the author, who has made a long career of visiting remote venues such as Antarctica, Greenland, and the lesser known of the Galápagos Islands. From these travels he has extracted truths about the world, such as the fact that places differ as widely as the people who live in them. Even when traveling with scientists from his own culture, Lopez finds differences of perception. On an Arctic island called Skraeling, for instance, he observes that if he and the biologists he is walking with were to encounter a grizzly feeding on a caribou, he would focus on the bear, the scientists on the whole gestalt of bear, caribou, environment; if a native of the place were along, the story would deepen beyond the immediate event, for those who possess Indigenous ways of knowledge, “unlike me…felt no immediate need to resolve it into meaning.” The author’s chapter on talismans—objects taken from his travels, such as “a fist-size piece of raven-black dolerite”—is among the best things he has written. But there are plentiful gems throughout the looping narrative, its episodes constructed from adventures over eight decades: trying to work out a bit of science as a teenager while huddled under the Ponte Vecchio after just having seen Botticelli’s Venus; admiring a swimmer as a septuagenarian while remembering the John Steinbeck whom he’d met as a schoolboy; gazing into the surf over many years’ worth of trips to Cape Foulweather, an Oregon headland named by Capt. James Cook, of whom he writes, achingly, “we no longer seem to be sailing in a time of fixed stars, of accurate chronometers, and of reliable routes.”
Exemplary writing about the world and a welcome gift to readers.Pub Date: March 20, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-394-58582-6
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
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