From a leading paleontologist, a book (not a catalogue) to complement a show: the American Museum of Natural History’s first “issues” exhibition, opening this spring in New York City, with curator Eldredge in charge. The theme is familiar to Eldredge (Reinventing Darwin, 1995, etc.) fans and environmentalists worldwide. In the author’s dramatic words, the planet has undergone five major extinctions since life began—and we now face a sixth, the product of our own actions. The book sets out to answer four questions: What is biodiversity? Why should we care about it? What precisely threatens it? And what can we do to stem the tide? The answers are played out in terms of the twin “modes” that influence life: evolution and ecosystems. Interestingly, Eldredge begins with a close-up view of territory he knows well: Botswana, home to the Eden-like Okavango River delta, as well as the nearby dry Kalahari region. Vagaries of climate (recent drought), population increases, cattle-raising, abandonment of the local hunter-gatherer lifestyle for agriculture—these are among the major threats to the survival of the “big hairies,” as well as numerous others, including a species of termites that plays a unique role in the ecosystem. The book’s remaining sections celebrate global biodiversity, allowing Eldredge to indulge in picking his favorites across the flora and fauna (nicely illustrated). The value of diversity addresses esthetics as well as the need to ensure variation for evolution to play upon, not to mention the potential for new sources of drugs and other useful goods. As for stemming the tide, the message is control, control, control (of excesses, land use, population) and empowerment of women and of local peoples to utilize local resources wisely—messages often heard but little heeded. In a book that’s part rhapsody, part sermon, Eldredge once more may be addressing a choir of believers. One can only hope that the throngs attending the exhibition absorb and act on the message.
Pub Date: May 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-691-00125-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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