An erudite, engaging book that will find the broadest readership among nature lovers on the other side of the Atlantic.
A prizewinning British wildlife writer reveals the special place of butterflies in our imagination and cultural life.
Marren (Bugs Britannica, 2010, etc.), an “authority on invertebrate folklore and names,” begins with his own childhood obsession with butterflies, sharing the moment when, at age 5, he saw the “rainbow dust” left on his fingers by a painted lady’s wing. As he makes clear, those innocent days of butterfly hunting and collecting are long gone, given way to efforts to conserve these creatures in a deteriorating environment. Marren has a firm grasp of history and biology, filling his narrative with vivid accounts of interesting events and encounters with writers, illustrators, hobbyists, and scientists. With an easy style, the author considers butterflies in art and literature—from ancient manuscripts to Vladimir Nabokov and John Fowles—and even advertising. Butterflies sell, with their images on products suggesting such positive ideas as freedom, beauty, joy, and purity. This is not a field guide or a natural history but rather a celebration of butterflies with a note of sadness over the decline of these creatures. Marren notes that the joy that butterflies brought to previous generations is now tinged with apprehension over their future. Each chapter opens with a drawing of a butterfly; unfortunately, all are in black and white. Although this is not meant to be a field guide, it does have reference value: an appendix provides thumbnail sketches of British butterflies from the most common to the rarest. Unfortunately, these lists point up one of the book’s weaknesses, at least from the point of view of American readers: its focus on British butterflies.
An erudite, engaging book that will find the broadest readership among nature lovers on the other side of the Atlantic.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-226-39588-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: Sept. 5, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
The book is not entirely negative; final chapters indicate roads of reversal, before it is too late!
It should come as no surprise that the gifted author of The Sea Around Usand its successors can take another branch of science—that phase of biology indicated by the term ecology—and bring it so sharply into focus that any intelligent layman can understand what she is talking about.
Understand, yes, and shudder, for she has drawn a living portrait of what is happening to this balance nature has decreed in the science of life—and what man is doing (and has done) to destroy it and create a science of death. Death to our birds, to fish, to wild creatures of the woods—and, to a degree as yet undetermined, to man himself. World War II hastened the program by releasing lethal chemicals for destruction of insects that threatened man’s health and comfort, vegetation that needed quick disposal. The war against insects had been under way before, but the methods were relatively harmless to other than the insects under attack; the products non-chemical, sometimes even introduction of other insects, enemies of the ones under attack. But with chemicals—increasingly stronger, more potent, more varied, more dangerous—new chain reactions have set in. And ironically, the insects are winning the war, setting up immunities, and re-emerging, their natural enemies destroyed. The peril does not stop here. Waters, even to the underground water tables, are contaminated; soils are poisoned. The birds consume the poisons in their insect and earthworm diet; the cattle, in their fodder; the fish, in the waters and the food those waters provide. And humans? They drink the milk, eat the vegetables, the fish, the poultry. There is enough evidence to point to the far-reaching effects; but this is only the beginning,—in cancer, in liver disorders, in radiation perils…This is the horrifying story. It needed to be told—and by a scientist with a rare gift of communication and an overwhelming sense of responsibility. Already the articles taken from the book for publication in The New Yorkerare being widely discussed. Book-of-the-Month distribution in October will spread the message yet more widely.
The book is not entirely negative; final chapters indicate roads of reversal, before it is too late!Pub Date: Sept. 27, 1962
ISBN: 061825305X
Page Count: 378
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1962
APPRECIATIONS
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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