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FLIGHT MAPS

ADVENTURES WITH NATURE IN MODERN AMERICA

Piquant explorations of attitudes toward the “natural” world as mediated by the likes of Ralph and Martha and Hollywood, from essayist Price. Accept as a given, Price reasonably suggests, that our “most common and everyday encounters with the natural world take place through mass-produced culture.” How, then, do lawn ornaments and Northern Exposure and a scad of like vehicles and arbiters shape our perceptions of nature? Price believes they have condemned nature as a Place Apart from our daily life, molded to the needs of those in power: the politicians, the business elite, the purveyors of fashion. Worse still, our alienation from nature makes it that much easier to ignore those times when our dealings with it don’t jibe with our professions of concern toward it. This is hardly late-breaking news, Price notes, using as an example the late, lamented passenger pigeon, whose sorry fate a century ago was engineered by market forces: it was much in demand at the restaurant table. Regarding matters of taste in our communions with nature, Price turns to lawn flamingoes (are they any more an artifice than Capability Brown’s interventions?) and their evolution from an expression of working-class landscape strategy to symbols of “anything outrageous, rebellious, oxymoronic, inappropriate or transgressive.” The last two chapters enter the mare’s nest of green stores and green television. The former, epitomized by the Nature Company, erecting a false-front concern for nature as it sustains “the capitalist overconsumption of resources that underpins American middle- and upper-class life.” With flair, Price makes her point: For better or worse, from Lascaux to Marty Stouffer, our notions of “nature” are often a self-serving, corrupting social construct that can be used to navigate an avoidance of societal and economic problems rather than highlighting them.

Pub Date: May 1, 1999

ISBN: 0-465-02485-8

Page Count: 212

Publisher: Basic Books

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1999

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WHY FISH DON'T EXIST

A STORY OF LOSS, LOVE, AND THE HIDDEN ORDER OF LIFE

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

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THE BOOK OF EELS

OUR ENDURING FASCINATION WITH THE MOST MYSTERIOUS CREATURE IN THE NATURAL WORLD

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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