An enchanting, accessible tour of the seashell and its place and purpose within the natural world.
British marine biologist Scales (Poseidon’s Steed: The Story of Seahorses, from Myth to Reality, 2009) reinvigorates conchology and the lost art of seashell appreciation.
Appalled that their reputation for enigmatic splendor as “glorious objects” has become tarnished, replaced with modern, kitschy “inelegant clutter” on counters and shelves, the author diligently explores the purpose and allure of seashells and introduces a selection of scientists and artists who study and create art from them. Uninterested in creating just another comprehensive shell guide, Scales skillfully focuses her narrative primarily on mollusks and how, living or dead, they connect with the human world. Through stories and personal experiences, beginning with her fascination with them as a girl on the beaches of Cornwall, England, and later, sea diving as an adult, she demonstrates her encyclopedic knowledge of Conchifera through absorbing chapters reaching back to the mollusk’s primitive relatives: “all manner of shrimpy, crabby, wormy creatures that look very little like any living species” slithering across a Cambrian seabed. Scales spins spellbinding science throughout, introducing readers to carnivorous cone snails that spit out paralytic darts, the “vacancy chains” of hermit crabs, the lacquered luster of the prized cowry shell, and the fluttery sex lives of sea butterflies and bivalves. Astutely referencing the work of a variety of biologists, fishery scientists, and passionate beachcombers, Scales examines how these chalky exoskeletons and their spiraled patterns are strategically produced by their hosts, considers their symbolism, and ponders the mannerisms in which humans collect once-living objects: “They appeal to the hoarder in us all, the part of us that wants to have and keep things, especially those mementos that remind us of a different time and place.” From a cautionary perspective, however, the author would prefer that admirers “resist temptation and leave them all alone.”
An enchanting, accessible tour of the seashell and its place and purpose within the natural world.Pub Date: July 21, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4729-1136-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
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
Loads of good explaining, with reminders, time and again, of how much remains unknown, neatly putting the death of science...
Bryson (I'm a Stranger Here Myself, 1999, etc.), a man who knows how to track down an explanation and make it confess, asks the hard questions of science—e.g., how did things get to be the way they are?—and, when possible, provides answers.
As he once went about making English intelligible, Bryson now attempts the same with the great moments of science, both the ideas themselves and their genesis, to resounding success. Piqued by his own ignorance on these matters, he’s egged on even more so by the people who’ve figured out—or think they’ve figured out—such things as what is in the center of the Earth. So he goes exploring, in the library and in company with scientists at work today, to get a grip on a range of topics from subatomic particles to cosmology. The aim is to deliver reports on these subjects in terms anyone can understand, and for the most part, it works. The most difficult is the nonintuitive material—time as part of space, say, or proteins inventing themselves spontaneously, without direction—and the quantum leaps unusual minds have made: as J.B.S. Haldane once put it, “The universe is not only queerer than we suppose; it is queerer than we can suppose.” Mostly, though, Bryson renders clear the evolution of continental drift, atomic structure, singularity, the extinction of the dinosaur, and a mighty host of other subjects in self-contained chapters that can be taken at a bite, rather than read wholesale. He delivers the human-interest angle on the scientists, and he keeps the reader laughing and willing to forge ahead, even over their heads: the human body, for instance, harboring enough energy “to explode with the force of thirty very large hydrogen bombs, assuming you knew how to liberate it and really wished to make a point.”
Loads of good explaining, with reminders, time and again, of how much remains unknown, neatly putting the death of science into perspective.Pub Date: May 6, 2003
ISBN: 0-7679-0817-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
BOOK TO SCREEN
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