A shocking, aggressively written marine park exposé.
A former SeaWorld killer whale trainer dispenses serious allegations against the company and the industry at large.
In Hargrove’s unnerving opening sequence, he writes of being antagonistically nudged into the center of a performance pool by an aggressive, 6,000-pound orca. It is with this same unique amalgam of “dread and wonderment” that Hargrove characterizes both his longtime, high-ranking professional relationship with orca whales and his astonishment at how broken the performance animal arena has become—particularly at SeaWorld. He writes of a lifelong affinity for whales, an adoration that began as a boy on his annual trips to SeaWorld in Orlando and continued with an apprenticeship in Texas and, ultimately, years spent as a senior instructor at SeaWorld San Antonio and in France. Though his appreciation for and understanding of the species are abundantly clear, the author addresses the inherent dangers these oversized mammals can pose to even seasoned instructors while calling out SeaWorld’s misdeeds and cruel methods employed to obtain, control and artificially breed their stable of whales. The public performances can be treacherous, he writes, and leave little margin for error since the whales, while fully trained, can still exhibit aggressive behavior and attack without warning, as chronicled in the lethal assault and corporate obfuscation case seen in the independent documentary Blackfish (2013). Hargrove divulges some of the lesser-known, more insidious facts about marine parks: the ways whales are artificially impregnated, how boredom can become their undoing, and that these virtual “prisoners in the park” are subjected to secretive food-deprivation tactics to ensure that they understand “that it is best to cooperate.” Hargrove believes the basis of SeaWorld’s bottom-line corporate strategy was to treat the whales as a “company asset on the ledgers” and “a matter for spreadsheets.” The author left the industry in 2012 after an “intellectual conversion” in which he realized the lives of trained whales were a living hell.
A shocking, aggressively written marine park exposé.Pub Date: March 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-137-28010-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Jan. 7, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2015
This is our life, these are our lighted seasons, and then we die. . . . In the meantime, in between time, we can see. . . we can work at making sense of (what) we see. . . to discover where we so incontrovertibly are. It's common sense; when you-move in, you try to learn the neighborhood." Dillard's "neighborhood" is hilly Virginia country where she lived alone, but essentially it is all those "shreds of creation" with which every human is surrounded, which she is trying to learn, to know — from finite variations to infinite possibilities of being and meaning. A tall order and Dillard doesn't quite fill it. She is too impatient to get about the soul's adventures to stay long with an egg-laying grasshopper, or other bits of flora and fauna, and her snatches from physics and biological/metaphysical studies are this side of frivolous. However, Ms. Dillard has a great deal going for her — in spite of some repetition of words and concepts, her prose is bright, fresh and occasionally emulates (not imitates) the Walden Master in a contemporary context: "Trees. . . extend impressively in both directions, . . . shearing rock and fanning air, doing their real business just out of reach." She has set herself no less a task than understanding emotionally, spiritually and intellectually the force of the creative extravagance of the universe in all its beauty and horhor ("There is a terrible innocence in the benumbed world of the lower animals, reducing life to a universal chomp.") Experience can be focused, and awareness sharpened, by a kind of meditative high. Thus this becomes somewhat exhausting reading, if taken in toto, but even if Dillard's reach exceeds her grasp, her sights are leagues higher than that of Anne Morrow Lindbergh's Gift from the Sea, regretfully (re her sex), the inevitable comparison.
Pub Date: March 13, 1974
ISBN: 0061233323
Page Count: -
Publisher: Harper's Magazine Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1974
IN THE NEWS
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
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