The author tackles an endangered species with less obvious charm than pandas or dolphins, but his love of them and the lore...
A new entry to the rapidly growing body of literature on endangered animals, this time about a species that has survived for millennia and is found around the world.
Award-winning journalist Laufer (Chair, Journalism/Univ. of Oregon; Organic: A Journalist's Quest to Discover the Truth Behind Food Labeling, 2014, etc.), who is also a documentary filmmaker and broadcaster, has traveled the globe to examine the illegal trade in turtles. He shows the horror of this practice and of both the ingenuity and the stupidity of smugglers (in one chapter, he writes about a smuggler who was caught hiding turtles in his sweatpants). Among the author’s reports on poaching, vendors, chefs, and undercover agents, Laufer inserts short essays on his relationship, or attempted relationship, with his pet turtle, Fred. Another personal touch are the author’s accounts of his encounters with chefs; though he was able to calmly and carefully observe the preparation of turtle soup in a kitchen, the committed vegetarian never sampled the finished dish. The brief Fred stories are welcome changes from some of the disturbing scenes that Laufer describes. An especially memorable one was filmed by a Canadian schoolgirl touring Vancouver’s Chinatown, where she witnessed meat being sliced from live turtles; happily, the publicity that followed did change some Canadian regulations. Judging from the author’s report, however, not nearly enough is being done to protect turtles, tortoises, and terrapins (a distinction many general readers may not know). Laufer, who calls turtles “the canaries in the coalmine called Earth where we all live,” views the process of saving them as being “of existential importance to us all,” and his book is a clear call for action.
The author tackles an endangered species with less obvious charm than pandas or dolphins, but his love of them and the lore he includes makes this a highly readable book.Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-12809-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
Not light reading but essential for policymakers—and highly recommended for the 40 million people who rely on the Great...
An alarming account of the “slow-motion catastrophe” facing the world’s largest freshwater system.
Based on 13 years of reporting for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, this exhaustively detailed examination of the Great Lakes reveals the extent to which this 94,000-square-mile natural resource has been exploited for two centuries. The main culprits have been “over-fishing, over-polluting, and over-prioritizing navigation,” writes Egan, winner of the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award. Combining scientific details, the stories of researchers investigating ecological crises, and interviews with people who live and work along the lakes, the author crafts an absorbing narrative of science and human folly. The St. Lawrence Seaway, a system of locks, canals, and channels leading to the Atlantic Ocean, which allows “noxious species” from foreign ports to enter the lakes through ballast water dumped by freighters, has been a central player. Biologically contaminated ballast water is “the worst kind of pollution,” writes Egan. “It breeds.” As a result, mussels and other invasive species have been devastating the ecosystem and traveling across the country to wreak harm in the West. At the same time, farm-fertilizer runoff has helped create “massive seasonal toxic algae blooms that are turning [Lake] Erie’s water into something that seems impossible for a sea of its size: poison.” The blooms contain “the seeds of a natural and public health disaster.” While lengthy and often highly technical, Egan’s sections on frustrating attempts to engineer the lakes by introducing predator fish species underscore the complexity of the challenge. The author also covers the threats posed by climate change and attempts by outsiders to divert lake waters for profit. He notes that the political will is lacking to reduce farm runoffs. The lakes could “heal on their own,” if protected from new invasions and if the fish and mussels already present “find a new ecological balance.”
Not light reading but essential for policymakers—and highly recommended for the 40 million people who rely on the Great Lakes for drinking water.Pub Date: March 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-393-24643-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Jan. 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
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
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