A detailed observation of what it means to make a detailed observation.
A contemplation of an outdoor art instillation sparks meditations on time, distance, infinity, memory, and the interrelationship between the work and the viewer.
Queens Museum executive director Raicovich’s previous book, A Diary of Mysterious Difficulties (2013), interwove Dickens with erectile-dysfunction spam, and this one is just as difficult to pigeonhole. She explains in the acknowledgements that it took her “over a decade to complete,” though the text runs little more than 80 pages of observations, often typographically resembling free verse rather than prose, in what might be an attempt to slow readers down, to focus attention on detail as the author has. “These writings are dedicated to the recall of highly specific, vivid experiences of a work of art,” she writes. The work is The Lightning Field by Walter De Maria, comprising 400 stainless steel poles of varying heights in a desolate stretch of central New Mexico. One generally stays overnight to view the expanse of the artwork at various times, in various light and weather conditions, as the author did on four visits between 2003 and 2008. She quotes another critic on De Maria’s work, before Lightning, that “the burden of response is based not on the sculpture but on the spectator. The degree and quality of spectator engagement becomes crucial.” Though Raicovich writes very specifically about her experience in viewing the work, the book is less about the work itself than about the nature of perception, the malleability of memory—presumably, some or much of this was written well after the visit—and the elasticity of time. She frequently invokes Nabokov (Speak, Memory, in particular) and occasionally calculus. She also quotes De Maria: “The land is not the setting for the work but a part of the work….Isolation is the essence of land art.” On one occasion, she saw the poles as levitating.
A detailed observation of what it means to make a detailed observation.Pub Date: April 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-56689-466-1
Page Count: 104
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: Jan. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
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
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
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