A handsome book that is well-balanced, instructive, and authoritative.
A conservationist with a deep knowledge of pumas writes with infectious enthusiasm about their place in nature.
Williams, a wildlife biologist with Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks, shares bits of his personal life and his experiences with pumas not just in the Rocky Mountains of the American West, but in Chile and Argentina as well. The path of the puma, known also as the panther, mountain lion, or cougar, extends from the Yukon to Tierra del Fuego at the extreme south of Argentina; half of this work about the most widespread mammal in the Western hemisphere is set in Patagonia. The author fills his account with a host of characters he has known and worked with, including biologists, wildlife managers, hunters, ranchers, and gauchos. He introduces the puma as a silent stalker whose survival—indeed, its growth in both numbers and range—in North America has hinged on its invisibility. By contrast, in Patagonia, he finds that the animal is far more visible and that the conflicts between people, puma, and livestock loom large. Williams describes his role there as the bearer of important lessons of tolerance from Montana, and he describes the changes that are now beginning to restore the region’s ecological integrity. While the book is an undisguised conservationist’s plea, complete with an end-of-book “What You Can Do” section, it is not a harangue. The author’s passion and his firsthand knowledge of his subject make the narrative highly readable. A noteworthy feature of this work is the presence of numerous full-color photographs throughout, sometimes scattered, sometimes grouped together. Of course, the pumas are the stars of the show, but other creatures—bears, sheep, horses, deer, and other wild cats—are also included. The many spectacular landscape photographs are a treasure on their own and worth the cover price.
A handsome book that is well-balanced, instructive, and authoritative.Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-938340-72-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Patagonia
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
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
Whether you call this a personal story or nature writing, it’s poignant, thoughtful and moving—and likely to become a...
An inspired, beautiful and absorbing account of a woman battling grief—with a goshawk.
Following the sudden death of her father, Macdonald (History and Philosophy/Cambridge Univ.; Falcon, 2006, etc.) tried staving off deep depression with a unique form of personal therapy: the purchase and training of an English goshawk, which she named Mabel. Although a trained falconer, the author chose a raptor both unfamiliar and unpredictable, a creature of mad confidence that became a means of working against madness. “The hawk was everything I wanted to be: solitary, self-possessed, free from grief, and numb to the hurts of human life,” she writes. As a devotee of birds of prey since girlhood, Macdonald knew the legends and the literature, particularly the cautionary example of The Once and Future King author T.H. White, whose 1951 book The Goshawk details his own painful battle to master his title subject. Macdonald dramatically parallels her own story with White’s, achieving a remarkable imaginative sympathy with the writer, a lonely, tormented homosexual fighting his own sadomasochistic demons. Even as she was learning from White’s mistakes, she found herself very much in his shoes, watching her life fall apart as the painfully slow bonding process with Mabel took over. Just how much do animals and humans have in common? The more Macdonald got to know her, the more Mabel confounded her notions about what the species was supposed to represent. Is a hawk a symbol of might or independence, or is that just our attempt to remake the animal world in our own image? Writing with breathless urgency that only rarely skirts the melodramatic, Macdonald broadens her scope well beyond herself to focus on the antagonism between people and the environment.
Whether you call this a personal story or nature writing, it’s poignant, thoughtful and moving—and likely to become a classic in either genre.Pub Date: March 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0802123411
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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