First-rate report from a land even environmentalists forgot.
Travel journalist Tidwell (Amazon Stranger, 1996, etc.) takes a lingering, eye-opening look at the bayous and marshlands of West Louisiana.
Initially intent on documenting the lifestyles and mores of today’s Cajuns, heirs of the French settlers known as Acadians who were tragically uprooted from maritime Canada in the 1750s by the conquering British, the author discovers more than predictable nostalgia for an oft-probed, fading tradition. With their boats, nets, and bayou camps, he realizes, these proudly stubborn people are essentially feeding America by delivering more shrimp, crab, and other seafood than any other region, or even several combined. But with their culture slip-sliding away, Tidwell finds many Cajuns strangely resigned to an even more disturbing fact: the actual ground they live on is disappearing into the Gulf of Mexico at the rate of 25 square miles (roughly the size of Manhattan) per year. The more he grows unabashedly enamored of the Cajuns’ work ethic, their good-humored, independent nature, and welcoming rituals in which ambrosial gumbos seemingly appear out of thin air, the more exercised he becomes over the idea that nobody seems to care (e.g., the national media isn’t reporting) that a unique American resource is literally going down the drain. In between night jaunts down the bayou to the shrimping “battleground” when the spring tides turn, the author looks for straight answers from the experts. It’s no surprise that decades of containing the Mississippi’s flood waters with increasingly massive levees has shut down the natural delta-forming mechanism; add a crazy-quilt of oil company pipelines, each with an attendant canal, and the marshland’s death sentence is final. Tidwell won’t quit until he finds a plan, and while there’s some hope for reversal, it’s arguable that this can be pulled off, even with massive Federal aid, in a state where political payoffs are a cottage industry.
First-rate report from a land even environmentalists forgot.Pub Date: March 4, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-42076-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Whether you call this a personal story or nature writing, it’s poignant, thoughtful and moving—and likely to become a...
An inspired, beautiful and absorbing account of a woman battling grief—with a goshawk.
Following the sudden death of her father, Macdonald (History and Philosophy/Cambridge Univ.; Falcon, 2006, etc.) tried staving off deep depression with a unique form of personal therapy: the purchase and training of an English goshawk, which she named Mabel. Although a trained falconer, the author chose a raptor both unfamiliar and unpredictable, a creature of mad confidence that became a means of working against madness. “The hawk was everything I wanted to be: solitary, self-possessed, free from grief, and numb to the hurts of human life,” she writes. As a devotee of birds of prey since girlhood, Macdonald knew the legends and the literature, particularly the cautionary example of The Once and Future King author T.H. White, whose 1951 book The Goshawk details his own painful battle to master his title subject. Macdonald dramatically parallels her own story with White’s, achieving a remarkable imaginative sympathy with the writer, a lonely, tormented homosexual fighting his own sadomasochistic demons. Even as she was learning from White’s mistakes, she found herself very much in his shoes, watching her life fall apart as the painfully slow bonding process with Mabel took over. Just how much do animals and humans have in common? The more Macdonald got to know her, the more Mabel confounded her notions about what the species was supposed to represent. Is a hawk a symbol of might or independence, or is that just our attempt to remake the animal world in our own image? Writing with breathless urgency that only rarely skirts the melodramatic, Macdonald broadens her scope well beyond herself to focus on the antagonism between people and the environment.
Whether you call this a personal story or nature writing, it’s poignant, thoughtful and moving—and likely to become a classic in either genre.Pub Date: March 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0802123411
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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