Provocative and surprisingly persuasive.
The author of Meeting the Tree of Life (1997) finds nature in urban Ohio and, in this educative voyage of discovery, suggests it is not such a miracle after all.
“I never wanted to live in Cincinnati,” Tallmadge lets readers know from the start. He had just lost his teaching job in Minnesota, a place that had fed his desire for wilderness, and now he was heading for a Rust Belt dung hole of ratty rivers and industrial despair, as well as moving into university administration, a decided step south from his urge to teach. “As downtown approached, the world seemed to fade into gray,” he writes, dismayed by this urban time/space so uprooted, fragmented, and abstract, deaf to the music of the spheres. But Tallmadge is a thinking man (and not an inelegant writer); he knew there were experiences to be had and learning to get on with. Did Cincinnati truly condemn him to the pauperization of his soul, so attached to wild places? Or was he simply narrow-minded, blinkered to the possibilities? There is wilderness at hand even in his quarter-acre lot and its environs, he realizes: “enshrining wilderness in distant places allows us to justify our abuse, neglect and exploitation of local nature.” Wild edges and corridors, still rich, still pervasive of nature and landscape and home patch, can coexist with human use of the earth. Wishful thinking? Hardly. Taking cues from Gary Snyder, Aldo Leopold, and Henry Thoreau, Tallmadge hunkers down to get to know just where he is. “How, then, does one become native to a place? It requires time and attention . . . on the ground beneath our feet, which is the only ground we know.” As a character here says, “It all depends on what you listen for.”
Provocative and surprisingly persuasive.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2004
ISBN: 0-8203-2690-9
Page Count: 230
Publisher: Univ. of Georgia
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2004
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
Drawings, words, and a few photos combine to convey the depth of a tragedy that would leave most people dumbstruck.
A new life and book arise from the ashes of a devastating California wildfire.
These days, it seems the fires will never end. They wreaked destruction over central California in the latter months of 2018, dominating headlines for weeks, barely a year after Fies (Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow?, 2009) lost nearly everything to the fires that raged through Northern California. The result is a vividly journalistic graphic narrative of resilience in the face of tragedy, an account of recent history that seems timely as ever. “A two-story house full of our lives was a two-foot heap of dead smoking ash,” writes the author about his first return to survey the damage. The matter-of-fact tone of the reportage makes some of the flights of creative imagination seem more extraordinary—particularly a nihilistic, two-page centerpiece of a psychological solar system in which “the fire is our black hole,” and “some veer too near and are drawn into despair, depression, divorce, even suicide,” while “others are gravitationally flung entirely out of our solar system to other cities or states, and never seen again.” Yet the stories that dominate the narrative are those of the survivors, who were part of the community and would be part of whatever community would be built to take its place across the charred landscape. Interspersed with the author’s own account are those from others, many retirees, some suffering from physical or mental afflictions. Each is rendered in a couple pages of text except one from a fellow cartoonist, who draws his own. The project began with an online comic when Fies did the only thing he could as his life was reduced to ash and rubble. More than 3 million readers saw it; this expanded version will hopefully extend its reach.
Drawings, words, and a few photos combine to convey the depth of a tragedy that would leave most people dumbstruck.Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4197-3585-1
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Abrams ComicArts
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
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