After this edifying book, a trip to the zoo may never be the same.
Intrigued by the search for intelligent life? No need for space travel—it’s happening right here on Earth, and the results are amazing.
De Waal (Psychology/Emory Univ.; The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates, 2013, etc.), the director of the Living Links Center at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, tells us that it takes human ingenuity and respect to comprehend the level of intelligence of an animal. In example after example, he entertainingly demonstrates how researchers with those qualities have revealed surprising things about animal cognition and the porousness of the wall between human and animal cognition. First, for the nonscientist, the author provides some background on scientific thinking about animal behavior, putting paid to the bygone notion that animals are simply stimulus-response mechanisms or are solely driven by genetically endowed instincts. In recent years, scientists have begun to recognize the many surprising abilities of animals. The author’s field is primate behavior, and most of the examples come from that field, but elephants, octopuses, squirrels, and magpies are among the many other animals to appear in these pages. He shows us many animals both in the wild and in captivity solving challenging problems, planning future actions, having better-than-human memories, making and handling tools, communicating, and demonstrating empathy and cooperation. De Waal is persuasive in arguing that the difference between the cognition of the human and those of other animals is one of degree, not of kind, and the clarity of his writing makes for a highly readable book. A welcome bonus is the inclusion of rather charming, simple drawings by the author that give the essence of an activity better than a photograph might. For general readers, he includes a helpful glossary, and for those who want more details about the research cited, there is an extensive bibliography.
After this edifying book, a trip to the zoo may never be the same.Pub Date: April 25, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-393-24618-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
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
Unsentimental nature writing that sheds as much light on humans as on eels.
An account of the mysterious life of eels that also serves as a meditation on consciousness, faith, time, light and darkness, and life and death.
In addition to an intriguing natural history, Swedish journalist Svensson includes a highly personal account of his relationship with his father. The author alternates eel-focused chapters with those about his father, a man obsessed with fishing for this elusive creature. “I can’t recall us ever talking about anything other than eels and how to best catch them, down there by the stream,” he writes. “I can’t remember us speaking at all….Because we were in…a place whose nature was best enjoyed in silence.” Throughout, Svensson, whose beat is not biology but art and culture, fills his account with people: Aristotle, who thought eels emerged live from mud, “like a slithering, enigmatic miracle”; Freud, who as a teenage biologist spent months in Trieste, Italy, peering through a microscope searching vainly for eel testes; Johannes Schmidt, who for two decades tracked thousands of eels, looking for their breeding grounds. After recounting the details of the eel life cycle, the author turns to the eel in literature—e.g., in the Bible, Rachel Carson’s Under the Sea Wind, and Günter Grass’ The Tin Drum—and history. He notes that the Puritans would likely not have survived without eels, and he explores Sweden’s “eel coast” (what it once was and how it has changed), how eel fishing became embroiled in the Northern Irish conflict, and the importance of eel fishing to the Basque separatist movement. The apparent return to life of a dead eel leads Svensson to a consideration of faith and the inherent message of miracles. He warns that if we are to save this fascinating creature from extinction, we must continue to study it. His book is a highly readable place to begin learning.
Unsentimental nature writing that sheds as much light on humans as on eels.Pub Date: May 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-296881-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 29, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
© Copyright 2023 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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