Fans of travel literature will prize this shimmering account of a journey into the past.
A British writer heads for the South American rainforest in search of an elusive ancestor.
Other than Peter Ackroyd, nobody knows London better than Sinclair. Here, five decades into a distinguished writing career, he ventures farther afield, traveling to Peru on the trail of a Scottish ancestor who sought his fortune in coffee. “In some way yet to be defined,” writes Sinclair, “I believed that Arthur was out there, in the territory, a hungry ghost unconcerned with ‘closure.’ ” He adds, “Too many words, too many journeys on trains and planes, left me sick and used up.” Yet he felt an obligation to revisit his great-grandfather’s old haunts, and the journey recharged him. Traveling with his filmmaker daughter—an eminently practical young woman who actively sought out local guides and followed local customs, rather unlike Arthur, who made his way down a vast jungle river in the company of “a pair of duplicitous and drunken priests”—Sinclair found himself among Indigenous peoples and modern gold-rush looters of wild places, to say nothing of stray Sendero Luminoso terrorists and incautious tourists. At times, Sinclair approaches the philosophically charged anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques, and William Faulkner is never far away from his mind. The author also reflects on Joseph Conrad, Henry James, B. Traven, Werner Herzog, Arthur Rimbaud, the nature of memory, the state of civilization, and, above all, mortality (“grave goods should always be returned to the designated dark”)—especially since his travels immediately preceded a pandemic that would soon devastate the places of which he writes. While his story is often tangential and idiosyncratically told, it is packed with language of gnomic brilliance: “Knowing ourselves a little better with every mile travelled, we also know the savage pull of indifference.” A worthy practitioner of the close-scrape school of British wandering, Sinclair, as this book makes clear, deserves to be much better known abroad.
Fans of travel literature will prize this shimmering account of a journey into the past.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-78607-919-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Review Posted Online: Aug. 23, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2021
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.
A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.
In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536131
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
Are rivers alive? Macfarlane delivers a lucid, memorable argument in the affirmative.
The accomplished British nature writer turns to issues of environmental ethics in his latest exploration of the world.
In 1971, a law instructor asked a musing-out-loud question: Do trees have legal standing? His answer was widely mocked at the time, but it has gained in force: As Macfarlane chronicles here, Indigenous groups around the world are pressing “an idea that changes the world—the idea that a river is alive.” In the first major section of the book, Macfarlane travels to the Ecuadorian rainforest, where a river flows straight through a belt of gold and other mineral deposits that are, of course, much desired; his company on a long slog through the woods is a brilliant mycologist whose research projects have led not just to the discovery of a mushroom species that “would have first flourished on the supercontinent [of Gondwana] that formed over half a billion years ago,” but also to her proposing that fungi be considered a kingdom on a footing with flora and fauna. Other formidable activists figure in his next travels, to the great rivers of northern India, where, against the odds, some courts have lately been given to “shift Indian law away from anthropocentrism and towards something like ecological jurisprudence, underpinned by social justice.” The best part of the book, for those who enjoy outdoor thrills and spills, is Macfarlane’s third campaign, this one following a river in eastern Canada that, as has already happened to so many waterways there, is threatened to be impounded for hydroelectric power and other extractive uses. In delightfully eccentric company, and guided by the wisdom of an Indigenous woman who advises him to ask the river just one question, Macfarlane travels through territory so rugged that “even the trout have portage trails,” returning with hard-won wisdom about our evanescence and, one hopes, a river’s permanence and power to shape our lives for the better.
Are rivers alive? Macfarlane delivers a lucid, memorable argument in the affirmative.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780393242133
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: March 8, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
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