Sharp descriptive analyses capture this atavistic force that charges across the human imagination in phenomenal and dreadful...
Portraits of great wildfires from ex–Chicago Tribune reporter Maclean (Fire on the Mountain, 1999).
The 1953 Rattlesnake fire in northern California was the result of arson, which gives the author a chance to explore the motives of the arsonist (in this case banal, more the province of an anger-management specialist than a smokejumper) as well as the physiography of the fire: how it raced downhill, trumping the wisdom of firefighting lore, the willful winds resulting in a terrible blowup, “a swift, thunderous event engulfing everything in its path in a tidal wave of white-hot fire.” Maclean’s phrasing seems unnecessarily overwrought compared with the simple fact that 15 firefighters died as a consequence of the fire's erratic behavior; also uncomfortably mismatched are the bullying tactics of the arson investigators and the instability of the man accused of igniting the fire. The author depicts the emotional undertow of death, along with the inexorability of a fire gone wild: “When water hit the flames, puffs of white smoke shot upward. Then a new spot fire would sparkle into being a few yards away.” The second blaze, which erupted in 1999 in northern Nevada, demonstrates the dangers of not immediately jumping on a fire when suppression is the tactic of choice, a topic that segues neatly into chapters on the evolution of firefighting policy in the Forest Service. In addition, Maclean notes the folly of hubris in the face of wildfire, the administrative snafus that can result in entrapment of firefighters, the pure miracle of escape (“The nugget of flame churned at the mouth of the gulch, then unexpectedly sped away”), even the value of a personal prayer. “Mommy, help me! I'm burning!” was the radio call of one fighter. She lived, happy to face down the jibes.
Sharp descriptive analyses capture this atavistic force that charges across the human imagination in phenomenal and dreadful fashion. (21 b&w illustrations, not seen; 2 maps)Pub Date: June 2, 2003
ISBN: 0-8050-7212-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003
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
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
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