A moving, effective tale that urges readers to place greater importance on environmental conservation.
An award-winning filmmaker describes three decades of work with dolphins.
In this compelling memoir, Jones, best known for his documentaries on marine life, recounts his experience filming and interacting with dolphins. His work initially began in 1978 after he learned about cruel fishing techniques that rely on dolphins to catch tuna, often leading to mass deaths of dolphins. Jones decided to produce a film documenting dolphins underwater in their natural habitat, a feat considered impossible by marine experts, including the esteemed Jacques Cousteau. Fortunately, with the help of treasure diver Bob Marx, Jones learned of an unusually friendly school of dolphins living in the Bahamas. With a small crew, Jones worked with the school to create his first film Dolphin, and thus began his lifelong desire to document and protect these intelligent aquatic animals. Over the next three decades, Jones made several films for PBS, National Geographic, Discovery and more; co-founded Bluevoice.org to protect dolphins and whales; and created film footage that helped spur a public outcry against Starkist Tuna’s fishing techniques (reformed practices and the Starkist “dolphin safe” label were born as a result). Jones writes in an engaging, conversational tone and readers will find the segments describing human interaction with wild dolphins fascinating as they attempt to communicate through an underwater piano and a dolphin call generator. While the book occasionally veers toward sappy descriptions of humans connecting and cavorting with dolphins, accounts of the marine mammals’ sheer intelligence are astounding. In more personal sections, Jones juxtaposes his film work with his battle with multiple myeloma, a form of blood cancer linked to the same toxic chemicals that affect dolphins. Indeed, a central theme of the book is that the animals face an uncertain future, threatened by destructive fishing techniques and a rising number of ocean contaminants.
A moving, effective tale that urges readers to place greater importance on environmental conservation.Pub Date: May 4, 2011
ISBN: 978-1456377533
Page Count: 238
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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