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 savory collection of natural history entertainments from Conniff (Spineless Wonders: Strange Tales from the Invertebrate World, 1996), who shares much with one of his subjects, the weasel—both being “very curious, investigative creatures.” Here is a pleasurable miscellany of essays on animals often near but rarely dear: the bat, the cormorant, the house mouse, the porcupine. Much of what Conniff has to report may seem odd, but it’s really only Nature steaming along on a normal day: for instance, the grizzly bear, taking August off to dine solely on moths. Or the cahow, a bird thought to be extinct for 350 years, that spends most of its life airborne at sea, returning to land only to nest in burrows under cedar woods. Or the serious scenting talents of the bloodhound (now to be found coursing the English countryside not for that ancient quarry, the fox, but for joggers who volunteer as bait), which more than compensate for all the slobber it produces. Consider the lordly moles tramping their estates, knotting and secreting earthworms against a stormy day. There is the pathological ill will that has been visited upon the cormorant, and there is the bum rap laid on that evolutionarily suicidal “mad dog of tunnel warfare,” the stoat. Conniff has also sought out darker engagements, with sharks and snapping turtles, to underscore that “mix of wonder and dread, attraction and repulsion” that characterize so much of our dealings with wild creatures (and a response that Conniff finds healthy evidence that we are still in touch with our “Pleistocene memories,” those instincts that were once elemental in human survival). After all is said and done, it is a relief that Conniff doesn’t stir the ashes of his experiences afield for deep truths. The creatures themselves are truth, and reason, enough. (line drawings)
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-8050-5697-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Freelance journalist Hertsgaard (A Day in the Life: The Music and Artistry of the Beatles, 1995, etc.) circles the earth to gauge the extent of environmental destruction and local peoples’ attitude toward it—and, by extension, whether the species will survive the 21st century. His travels have revealed to Hertsgaard that Earth’s in miserable health. From the Dinka in Ethiopia and Sudan, who suffer from the twin ravages of drought and famine, to Bohemian schoolchildren who wear gas masks to class as a result of coal burning, to the unpleasantly tactile quality of the auto-fouled air in Bangkok (and any other urban area without decent public transportation), these are dark days on the environmental front. Unsurprisingly, one culprit Hertsgaard identifies incessantly is capitalism, “predicated on continual growth, and traditionally growth has meant ecological destruction and decline.” His case is made, his point taken. The other culprit is the continuing division between haves and have-nots: “It is easy for outsiders to warn against the long-term costs of damming Africa’s rivers . . . but it is akin to a glutton admonishing a beggar on the evil of carbohydrates.” Guilt keeps the big consumers at bay (and their politicians are stymied by conflicting interests). Meanwhile, hopes for a better future, though tinged with fatalism, keep developing countries hard at developing (—I am used to it” becomes a mantra whenever he questions folks on their revolting environment). The result: stasis. Hertsgaard advises us to cut back on consumption, promote environmentally sound industry, and shift the surplus wealth from the rich, where it languishes, to the poor, by whom he believes it will be spent. However barmy, however wishful Hertsgaard’s prescriptions, he’s got one thing right: when it comes to the environment, we remain the sorcerer’s apprentice, and the mess only gets bigger. ($40,000 ad/promo; author tour)
Pub Date: Jan. 6, 1999
ISBN: 0-7679-0058-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1998
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
