With expert knowledge and wry humor, Roman returns animals to their rightful place at the center of the environment.
A colorful picture of how wild animals can heal a damaged environment.
A book dealing with feces and carcasses may not sound like an appetizing read, but conservation biologist and marine ecologist Roman, author of Whale and Listed: Dispatches From America’s Endangered Species Act, delivers a thought-provoking, accessible text. His focus is on the interaction between wild animals and the environment, and he begins in Surtsey, a volcanic island that rose out of the ocean near Iceland in 1963. For years, it was a barren outcrop, but gradually seabirds began to nest there. Their excrement provided nitrates and phosphates for seeds to take root, and eventually the island became a lively place. This highlights the role that animals play in biological loops, and Roman continues his theme by tracing how whales spread valuable nutrients throughout the ocean. No armchair theorist, the author chronicles his treks through bear country in the Pacific Northwest to assess the environmental impact of salmon spawning. He sees great value in projects such as the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone Park and bison to the Great Plains. Ecosystems are basically puzzles, and each piece fits into many others. Even hippos play an important role as prolific contributors of fecal matter. At the tiny end of the size scale, insects like midges provide nutrition to plants through their decaying corpses. Roman makes a range of useful proposals, such as an expansion of rewilding programs and nature reserves. He points out that building up wild environments would help to fight climate change. While his commitment to the environment is clear, he avoids the hectoring tone of some ecologists, and the result is a book that entertains and encourages readers to see the world from a different perspective.
With expert knowledge and wry humor, Roman returns animals to their rightful place at the center of the environment.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2023
ISBN: 9780316372923
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Little, Brown Spark
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
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
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SEEN & HEARD
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
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