An exuberant celebration of biology in the wild, far from labs, classrooms, and offices. Lowman is a tropical botanist, but, she explains disarmingly, what she really does is climb trees. “I did not intend to climb trees for a career,” she writes. “In fact, I tried desperately to think of alternatives to climbing’such as training a monkey, utilizing large telephoto cameras on pulleys, or working along cliff edges where rain-forest treetops were at eye level before cascading into valleys below.” She had ample reason to become what she calls an “arbornaut,” however: For a tropical biologist, the forest canopy is where the action is, where evolution happens. Such canopies have in fact been characterized as being among the Earth’s final biotic frontiers, places of astonishing biodiversity that shelter countless unknown or incompletely described species. Her work, she admits, has not always been thrilling; one of her early projects involved marking thousands of leaves in a forest canopy in eastern Australia to serve as a sample base for a study of leaf growth dynamics—a project that occupied her for several years. But later projects, as she recounts in her easygoing narrative, have taken her to nearly every jungle in the world, where she has pondered such matters as the long odds of a seedling’s reaching maturity (one percent of a tropical forest’s crop of seedlings makes it to treehood) and where she has helped build tall walkways that have promoted canopy-level ecotourism and saved a few patches of forest from the chainsaw. While acknowledging the dangers of working at high altitude in the tropics, where diseases and sometimes unfriendly animals lurk, Lowman emphasizes the pleasures and intellectual rewards of studying the natural world. Besides, she adds, “learning to exclaim instead of complain has been my most valuable lesson.” Young women interested in careers in science will especially benefit from Lowman’s encouragement, but general readers will enjoy her book as well. (30 illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: June 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-300-07818-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1999
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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