Persuasive, idiosyncratic, and often quite amusing.
English author Cocker (Rivers of Blood, Rivers of Gold, 2000, etc.) offers a combined celebration of and apologia for the national passion for birding, which in Britain provides both the thrill of high competition and the bonding of a cult.
After 30 years of dealing with his own obsession for bird-watching (as it is somewhat more commonly known on this Atlantic shore), the author brings both experience and perspective to bear on the subject. However, novice birders should not expect a systematic treatise on advancing their craft. Cocker is much more interested in why than how, and he often lets his preoccupation with good form emerge in negative examples. Those who cannot deal properly with a bird’s external anatomy, such as distinguishing between primary, secondary, and tertiary wing feathers, he asserts, may or may not be “bird lovers,” but they’re not birders. Expounding on perhaps the major difference between the way Brits and Americans typically pursue this fast-growing activity, he spends an entire chapter on the virtues of taking notebooks into the field and filling them up as fast and furiously as possible with sketches as well as text. The author is simultaneously at his best and most ambivalent in parables of fellow “twitchers,” the (mostly) young bloods who have often dropped everything, including careers and spouses, to dash off somewhere far away for a glimpse of a rumored rarity. One friend and his wife, for example, cut short a US vacation and scramble back to England at word that a single Common Nighthawk has been spotted there (a rare occurrence) just a day after seeing nearly 50 of the same birds pass directly overhead in Cape May, New Jersey. Quirky and impulsive often beyond belief, some twitchers have been ultimately driven, the author effectively argues, to become among the finest interpreters on Earth of what nature can mean to human beings.
Persuasive, idiosyncratic, and often quite amusing.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-87113-844-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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