A weapons-grade indictment of river despoliation, and an astute analysis of the socioeconomic factors that affect it....
Taking a break from the foreign-affairs beat, amateur fly fisherman Black (The Good Neighbor, 1988, etc.) broadly contemplates northwest Connecticut’s Housatonic River, its Shepaug and Naugatuck tributaries, and their respective fates.
The Shepaug River, the author declares, is his “Platonic ideal of a trout stream”: pristine, musical, cradled in a handsome landscape, and filled with trout (at least until Memorial Day, when downstream Waterbury taps into the river). A mere ten miles to the east runs the Naugatuck, a poisonous swill of auto tires, shopping carts, and chemicals with names too long for comfort. Why was this? Black asks. How did natural phenomena, human choices, economics, odd moments of timing, and simple twists of fate come to this pass? The author approaches the rivers from two complementary perspectives: ecologically, as a question of hydrology, geology, botany, zoology, and climate change; and politically, as an important and intricate analysis of “the social, economic, and political food chain of the watershed.” Here, he discovers, was the epicenter of American iron and armament production from the Revolution to the Civil War, and here he discovers the trout pool paradox: “the production of iron required exactly the same ingredients that make up ideal trout habitat: limestone, fast water, and the cooling forest canopy.” That the Shepaug didn’t go the route of the Naugatuck was really a matter of timing: the railroad to the furnace came too late, and the area’s sheer loveliness attracted a resident population with the economic and political wherewithal to protect the land from development. Black does a neat job of spelling out the class warfare embodied by the two rivers, providing a trim history of Waterbury’s sorry political landscape. He also gives away his secret: having fished there for years, “I had never once seen another angler on these wild trout waters.” He can forget that now.
A weapons-grade indictment of river despoliation, and an astute analysis of the socioeconomic factors that affect it. (Illustrations throughout)Pub Date: April 7, 2004
ISBN: 0-618-31080-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2004
The book's virtues include Quammen's vivid account of his treks to the world's wild places and interviews with the experts...
Everything you might want to know about life and death on islands here, there, and everywhere on the globe can be found in Quammen's study of island biogeography.
The National Magazine Award-winning science writer (Outside magazine; The Flight of the Iguana, 1988, etc.) asks, Why does island life differ radically from mainland life? The answer, not surprisingly, is evolution. There are unique evolutionary opportunities as well as pressures on islands. On oceanic islands, which arise from deep sea eruptions (such as the Galapagos Islands), there may be fewer varieties of species; the first arrivals often expand to fill all sorts of ecological niches in a process called adaptive radiation. So it was with the varied populations of finches that Charles Darwin observed in the Galapagos. Islands that sit on continental shelves near enough to mainlands to have been connected by land bridges at times of major glaciation may have animal species as varied as those on the mainland, but the species are likely to differ in their behavior or appearance from mainland relatives. Some reptiles isolated on islands grew large, like the Komodo dragon of Indonesia; some mammals shrank, like the pygmy elephants found in Sicily. Some birds became flightless, like the celebrated dodo native to Mauritius. Quammen provides abundant examples of the variables that can foster or doom populations, ranging from the sheer size of an island (big is better), to bouts of bad weather, to the introduction of farming and the animal camp followers of man: pigs, rats, and cats.
The book's virtues include Quammen's vivid account of his treks to the world's wild places and interviews with the experts he finds there. The downside is too much of a muchness; Quammen's zeal to spill all his notes and a breezy style that grows wearying. Taken in small bites, however, there is much to glean here about the wonders, and also the fragility, of life on earth.Pub Date: April 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-684-80083-7
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1996
Waldbauer's wisdom is served up like a tantalizing tray of hors d'oeuvres, none of which will likely be declined. (22 line...
Waldbauer (Entomology/Univ. of Illinois) loves bugs, and he wants you to love them, too. Or at least to be fascinated enough to stop and look before squashing them underfoot.
This thoroughly gratifying survey of that most successful animal group (now 400 million years old) is given both temporal and Darwinian perspectives. Starting with the optimistic swarm of spring, Waldbauer paints the landscape of each season, filling it with every manner of creature (though insects take center stage) and describing their evolutionary talents: how they find mates, how they find food, how they avoid being found as food for others. He never has to stretch for the fantastic or sensational example, for the insect world is one long, strange parade of curiosities: critters with ears on their legs, teeth on their genitals, the smell of carbona on their breath. Waldbauer gives the scoop on the tricks of a dead leaf butterfly, cracks the code of the cricket's chirp, tends bar for a boozing moth, shares the satin bowerbird's obsession with the color blue. In the process, he puts the entire ecological picture into context—the integrated community of interdependent organisms, in which we humans have no reason to feel superior. Without the pollinating and scavenging talents of our multilegged friends, we never would have made it here in the first place. And Waldbauer never skirts the rarefied stuff, giving the exceedingly complex notion of natural selection, for example, the elasticity it deserves and rarely gets, somehow putting it across with the clarity of an easy reader.
Waldbauer's wisdom is served up like a tantalizing tray of hors d'oeuvres, none of which will likely be declined. (22 line illustrations)Pub Date: March 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-674-45488-X
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1996
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