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
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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