Lane has a fluid eye in “a world where time moves in more than one direction and no landscape holds steady for long,” and...
Concise forays into the heart of places scattered throughout the Americas and within his family’s history, from poet Lane (Weed Time, not reviewed).
These self-contained essays follow Lane as he takes in passing landscapes as well as his home one in the South Carolina piedmont. If he is afield—visiting a medicine wheel in Wyoming, the edenic granite inselbergs of Suriname, a waterway thick with crocodiles in Mexico—he bones up on the place’s literature, ever wary that it’s someone else’s imagination at work (“the imagination, I fear, is not as immediate as walking a stretch of good, hard country that’s new to you”). He tries to get into a place intuitively, to hunt and gather his won reactions, happy to know, say, about the Mayan sense of time (“Circles revolving within larger circles, some with a radius of 54,000 years”) but not disappointed when he can’t slip into the mindset. Around his home patch, he is eager to understand its “watershed thinking,” Gary Snyder’s approach, vulnerable to its visceral impact. He fights to preserve a Girl Scout camp, 56 acres of wilderness—within the confines of a city limit—that holds an endangered species: the dwarf-flowered heartleaf, which “like Camp Mary Elizabeth, flourishes only as long as it does not push up into the light.” There’s a slow poke down a local piedmont stream, where Lane is stung by “the darkest nostalgia when I see the bricked-up windows of the old mill,” and there are slow ambles into the brittle emotional landscape of family: “My father’s death placed me psychologically: I am the son of a suicide. I live in a place of abandonment . . . the weather is never predictable.”
Lane has a fluid eye in “a world where time moves in more than one direction and no landscape holds steady for long,” and it’s energizing to see through that eye, open as it is to both light and darkness.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-8203-2461-2
Page Count: 188
Publisher: Univ. of Georgia
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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