Howard demonstrates that there is much to appreciate about the rites and rituals that govern the when, where and how of...
Not everything you wanted to know about sex, but a fair compendium of the varieties of sexual behavior exhibited by all creatures, great and small.
Indignant at the media’s twice-told tales of spider cannibalism, whale penis sizes or zoo pandas’ sex problems, zoologist and nature writer Howard set out to tell it like it is. Sex has been around for eons; fossils provide evidence of its evolutionary importance. Readers may not remember all the details, but some things will stick—e.g., mallards’ “coercive copulation,” which involves the drake’s corkscrew-shaped penis inserted into the female’s counter-corkscrew–shaped vagina, which has side pockets to trap his unwanted sperm. She can widen the path to admit sperm from high-quality drakes, which she rates by the yellowness of their beaks, a sign of a healthy immune system. Then there’s the toilet brush–shaped dragonfly organ, used to expunge a competitor’s sperm, the slime trail that lures a slug to its mate and the mate-guarding of male mites. Reptilian behavior includes precoital iguana masturbation, thought to prep the male so as not to waste time with the female and risk attack by rivals or predators. But masturbation for pleasure is common, writes Howard, as is homosexuality, bisexuality (bonobos), and even necrophilia and child sexual abuse. The author’s survey includes conservators’ work to preserve species, such as a rare spider threatened by habitat loss. While the information is always interesting, the text reads like a set of essays without an organizing principle. There’s also a bit too much gushing and self-consciousness, as, for example, when Howard vents frustration at not catching a species in the act. He also admits to romanticism in a chapter about monogamy and love apparent in some birds and mammals. However, he is adamant that we just don't know enough about humans to declare what is the norm.
Howard demonstrates that there is much to appreciate about the rites and rituals that govern the when, where and how of species perpetuation.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4081-9341-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Sept. 7, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2014
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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