A mixed bag—a soft rejoinder of sorts to Henry Beston’s coastal classic The Outermost House (1925), slightly old-fashioned...
An unabashedly anthropomorphic celebration of life in the salt marsh.
On the Connecticut coast, NPR contributor and newspaper columnist Lender has been keeping track of the comings and goings of the birds of Long Island Sound. Here he charts, from season to season, those he sees from the fortunate vantage point of porch and yard. The first to appear is an osprey, a harbinger of good fortune to all but the fish it snags; then come the cedar waxwings, “eating the dusted bluepurple berries, touching close, unconcerned, talking to themselves as they dine.” Though crustier naturalists warn against imparting human motives and motivations to the animal world, Lender is unimpressed, writing without fear of the politics of nature, in which “you can sort the politically active from the merely vociferous by several well-worn criteria.” He coyly refers to a female woodpecker as “a little drummer girl” and attributes to the merlin a “Prussian dueling scar across his eye and Thousand-yard Stare.” For all the sentimentality and occasional heavy-handedness, it’s clear that the author knows his birds. For example, he pegs the killdeer, and its “catalogue of deceptions,” just right, and his brief glimpse of a peregrine in flight, “almost transparent in the penetrating light,” will bring a smile of recognition to anyone who has witnessed such a moment. Throughout, Lender advances an important message—that the coastal marshes must be preserved if worlds like this are to be harbored, but since we have a habit of building cities atop those places, there is work to be done to keep them safe.
A mixed bag—a soft rejoinder of sorts to Henry Beston’s coastal classic The Outermost House (1925), slightly old-fashioned and sometimes cloying, but still a pleasure for the birdwatching completist.Pub Date: April 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-312-65601-0
Page Count: 128
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2011
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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