A hymn in praise of all things great and small, from elephants to cockroaches, dolphins to beetles, by Meistersinger Angier (Natural Obsession: The Search for the Oncogene, 1988). Readers are in for a treat as the Pulitzer Prize winner updates and embellishes dozens of pieces she has done for the New York Times, organized in six broad areas: loving (mating and parenting); dancing (DNA and all its partners orchestrating cell life); slithering (many beastlies here: scorpions, scarabs, pit vipers); adapting (or ill adapting) as seen in behaviors of monkeys, hyenas, cichlids, and cheetahs; healing (about veggies, fat, menstruation, and the positive power of joy); creating (including profiles of three scientists), and dying (with some personal essays on AIDS and aging). What puts Angier in a class by herself is her ability to absorb a depth of knowledge about a given subject and play it back to the reader in language that sparkles with wit and imagery and metaphor. In this collection she even confesses to the pleasures of anthropomorphizing and lets us know exactly how she feels about some of the critters. Given a chance to hold a baby aye-aye (a small primate) acknowledged to have a bite that can ``pop the top off a coconut,'' she ``enthusiastically shoved the creature into [the primatologist's] hands as though it were a baby with diapers to be changed.'' There are plenty of facts (``the amount of human blood sucked by hookworms in a single day is equivalent to the total blood of 1.5 million people'') and lots of theories (for example, the idea that menstruation serves to cleanse the uterus of pathogens). The mark of excellence in a science writer is the ability to convey the excitement of discovery with a passion—while being dispassionate in reporting all sides of a story. Angier is a perfect example.
Pub Date: June 19, 1995
ISBN: 0-395-71816-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1995
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
Drawings, words, and a few photos combine to convey the depth of a tragedy that would leave most people dumbstruck.
A new life and book arise from the ashes of a devastating California wildfire.
These days, it seems the fires will never end. They wreaked destruction over central California in the latter months of 2018, dominating headlines for weeks, barely a year after Fies (Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow?, 2009) lost nearly everything to the fires that raged through Northern California. The result is a vividly journalistic graphic narrative of resilience in the face of tragedy, an account of recent history that seems timely as ever. “A two-story house full of our lives was a two-foot heap of dead smoking ash,” writes the author about his first return to survey the damage. The matter-of-fact tone of the reportage makes some of the flights of creative imagination seem more extraordinary—particularly a nihilistic, two-page centerpiece of a psychological solar system in which “the fire is our black hole,” and “some veer too near and are drawn into despair, depression, divorce, even suicide,” while “others are gravitationally flung entirely out of our solar system to other cities or states, and never seen again.” Yet the stories that dominate the narrative are those of the survivors, who were part of the community and would be part of whatever community would be built to take its place across the charred landscape. Interspersed with the author’s own account are those from others, many retirees, some suffering from physical or mental afflictions. Each is rendered in a couple pages of text except one from a fellow cartoonist, who draws his own. The project began with an online comic when Fies did the only thing he could as his life was reduced to ash and rubble. More than 3 million readers saw it; this expanded version will hopefully extend its reach.
Drawings, words, and a few photos combine to convey the depth of a tragedy that would leave most people dumbstruck.Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4197-3585-1
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Abrams ComicArts
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
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