Neely capably explores the complexity of his subjects with polish and finesse, looking carefully and thinking deeply.
A collection of essays that focuses on the interaction between humans and the natural world in and around the Rogue River in Oregon, where the author spent six months doing a writing residency.
The initial essay in Neely’s first full-length book introduces readers to his style as well as subject matter. Superficially, the essay, which includes almost as much white space as print, concerns the “semi-worthless” beach agates the author has collected along the Oregon coast. On a deeper level, it explores the notion of the essay as collection, allowing quotations from the likes of Carl Jung and Pliny the Elder to rub up against scientific facts and personal recollections, sparking new meanings. Other such challenging pieces include a sly meditation on Coyote, both as animal and trickster figure, and an exploration of chanterelles. If this were Neely’s only style, it might start to seem precious. But throughout these finely tuned essays that vary intriguingly in form and tone, the author shows that he is capable of more traditional, sustained pieces. One example is the chronicle of his experience with the Cow Creek Band of the Umpqua Indians as they performed a ceremony releasing a cooked salmon back into the river, as well as that of a less-ceremonial jaunt with the local fish hatchery guys as he helped them pitchfork dead salmon into the river to enrich the depleted nitrogen content. Death and human intervention into natural systems—with its usual mixed results—are central to these essays. The collection culminates in a long piece about the months Neely and his wife spent on a homestead out in the woods. Here again, acute observations of nature and records of the human history of the place are at least as prominent as anecdotes of their life.
Neely capably explores the complexity of his subjects with polish and finesse, looking carefully and thinking deeply.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-61902-836-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
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
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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