Informative, provocative, and engaging, if somewhat out of date.
A debut that blends personal essays and natural history to describe a mountain range in California.
Belli has explored the small group of mountains called the Diablos, located southeast of San Francisco, since he was 3, when his family moved to the nearby foothills. As an adult, he earned a degree in conservation biology at San Jose State University and worked for the National Park Service, surveying the land, animals, and plants in the area. He therefore brings plenty of experience to the 25 essays here. Despite the title, the author offers much more than a diary, competently weaving engaging accounts of his own experiences with information about biology, history, literature, and politics. In “Searching for Dan’l Webster,” for example, he begins by referencing Mark Twain’s 1865 story “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” Belli infers that Twain’s frog was a California red-leg because “no other frog in the state could jump like that.” He goes on to describe the reasons for the decline of the red-leg population as well as his own six years surveying Coe State Park to track the frogs’ remaining numbers. In “Of Mice and Man,” he relates a tragicomic story of his personal battle with deer mice and tells of the threat of hantavirus. And in “The Harder They Fall,” Belli describes the California condor with such passion and beauty that readers will feel compelled to look up photos of the bird. Most essays focus on animals, but several look at plants, waterways, and native peoples, showing how they’re all connected. His love for the land provides the writings’ main overtone, but a deep anger—sometimes tempered with sardonic wit—lies not far beneath: “One of the cruel truths about developing an appreciation of nature is that you come face-to-face with the stark reality that so much is in peril.” As noted in the introduction, Belli wrote most of these essays 10 years ago or more, often about events that took place earlier. As such, some details are no longer as relevant, but a newer version, perhaps with references, would likely be essential reading.
Informative, provocative, and engaging, if somewhat out of date.Pub Date: March 31, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5169-0944-5
Page Count: 278
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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