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
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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