Combining memoir, history and science, Rosen’s gracefully written chapters form an exquisitely crafted meditation on life...
Engaging account of a bookish New Yorker’s discovery of bird-watching.
Twelve years ago, at age 30, Rosen (Joy Comes in the Morning, 2004, etc.) took a class in bird-watching and found a new way of seeing. Through the “sanctioned voyeurism” of his new passion, he began noticing everything in Central Park, just two blocks from his Manhattan apartment: the birds, to be sure, but also connections between humans and the wild, the pleasure of lists and classifications, his own unexpected hungers and urges. In these pages Rosen mingles accounts of his own experiences in the field with those of others from Henry David Thoreau and Alfred Russel Wallace to the Yiddish journalist Abraham Cahan to convey the lure of a pastime pursued by 47.8 million Americans. Bird-watching, he declares, is “simultaneously marginal and utterly central to the business of being human.” Looking at the feathered creatures that are the dinosaurs’ closest living relatives satisfies his craving for wildness and makes him feel whole. Rosen’s text covers wide ground. Interesting facts include the bleak statistic that half of all migrating birds die on the journey. Among the famous birders profiled are John James Audubon, who killed and impaled hundreds of birds in order to resurrect them in paintings, and President Theodore Roosevelt, who burst into a cabinet meeting declaring he had just seen a chestnut-sided warbler. The author recounts pursuits of rare birds, from Wallace’s search for the bird of paradise to his own unsuccessful quest to spot the ivory-billed woodpecker in the Big Woods of Arkansas. Readers will close the book understanding the magic he feels at his favorite spring in Central Park during the day’s last hour of light, when birds come to drink.
Combining memoir, history and science, Rosen’s gracefully written chapters form an exquisitely crafted meditation on life and nature, as well as a splendid introduction to bird-watching.Pub Date: Feb. 27, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-374-18630-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2007
The book is not entirely negative; final chapters indicate roads of reversal, before it is too late!
It should come as no surprise that the gifted author of The Sea Around Usand its successors can take another branch of science—that phase of biology indicated by the term ecology—and bring it so sharply into focus that any intelligent layman can understand what she is talking about.
Understand, yes, and shudder, for she has drawn a living portrait of what is happening to this balance nature has decreed in the science of life—and what man is doing (and has done) to destroy it and create a science of death. Death to our birds, to fish, to wild creatures of the woods—and, to a degree as yet undetermined, to man himself. World War II hastened the program by releasing lethal chemicals for destruction of insects that threatened man’s health and comfort, vegetation that needed quick disposal. The war against insects had been under way before, but the methods were relatively harmless to other than the insects under attack; the products non-chemical, sometimes even introduction of other insects, enemies of the ones under attack. But with chemicals—increasingly stronger, more potent, more varied, more dangerous—new chain reactions have set in. And ironically, the insects are winning the war, setting up immunities, and re-emerging, their natural enemies destroyed. The peril does not stop here. Waters, even to the underground water tables, are contaminated; soils are poisoned. The birds consume the poisons in their insect and earthworm diet; the cattle, in their fodder; the fish, in the waters and the food those waters provide. And humans? They drink the milk, eat the vegetables, the fish, the poultry. There is enough evidence to point to the far-reaching effects; but this is only the beginning,—in cancer, in liver disorders, in radiation perils…This is the horrifying story. It needed to be told—and by a scientist with a rare gift of communication and an overwhelming sense of responsibility. Already the articles taken from the book for publication in The New Yorkerare being widely discussed. Book-of-the-Month distribution in October will spread the message yet more widely.
The book is not entirely negative; final chapters indicate roads of reversal, before it is too late!Pub Date: Sept. 27, 1962
ISBN: 061825305X
Page Count: 378
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1962
APPRECIATIONS
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
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