Caviar, it turns out, is not just tasty. In Carey’s hands, it’s luminous.
Hard to imagine that a story about fish eggs could be “fast-paced,” not to mention prophetic. But this piece of environmental journalism is both.
Carey (Against the Tide, 1999, etc.) traces the rise of the caviar industry and the concomitant decline of the sturgeon. Caviar dates to at least the 13th century, when a Mogol king dined on the eggs at a monastery, though in medieval Russia caviar was not a luxury—even peasants ate the “blackberry jam of tiny globes.” By the late 19th century, the taste for roe had spread to Germany, France, and the US, where it quickly achieved delicacy status and remains one of the most expensive epicurean dishes around: at Manhattan’s upscale Petrossian, says Carey, two ounces of beluga caviar cost well over a hundred dollars. Just a century ago, sturgeon were everywhere, the big kid on the block in most river systems in the northern hemisphere; but now the creatures whose eggs are so delectable have been overfished and are on the brink of extinction. Carey introduces scientists, entrepreneurs, and activists who are trying hard to keep the sturgeon around, though as is often the case with environmental policy, red tape and competing interests mean slow progress. A long tousle over the status of beluga sturgeon under the Endangered Spices Act culminated in 2004 with the listing of the fish as threatened, but the fate of beluga caviar imports to the US is still up in the air. In relating all this, Carey introduces some charming characters, from Petrossian’s head buyer, Eve Vega, to crusading lawyer biologist Frank Chapman. As for the subtitle, don’t be skeptical: this really is a book about desire. It’s about how Americans balance supply and demand, how “we discipline ourselves to measure our desires against finite means.” As such, it’s a book about America in microcosm.
Caviar, it turns out, is not just tasty. In Carey’s hands, it’s luminous.Pub Date: March 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-58243-173-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
In this comprehensive account—written with sufficient wit and historical asides to offset the tedium of names, dates, and geographic minutiae—yacht designer and photographer Gurney shows how the discovery of the icebound continent became one of the great goals of explorers beginning in the late 17th century. The history of Antarctic exploration begins not with Captain James Cook, whom many readers will at once recognize as the first to plunge south of the Antarctic Circle, but with haunting tales dating back to the Greeks, legends of a temperate, populated southern continent. It was not until the last year of the 17th century and the voyage of Edmond Halley that the idea of a fertile land presumed to lie between the Straits of Magellan and the Cape of Good Hope began to erode. Between 1773 and 1775, Cook's famous expedition led him south of the Antarctic convergence (the oceanic zone where the warm Atlantic meets the frigid high-latitude waters); circumnavigating the Antarctic icepack, he found no continent but did discover new lands, including the South Sandwich Islands. Other explorers were to make their marks in Antarctic exploration, but as the 18th century gave way to the 19th, it was the lure of easy fortune, not science, that increasingly drew expeditions to the rich Antarctic seas. It was, appropriately enough, the crew of a New Haven sealer that finally stepped ashore on Antarctica in 1820. Although Gurney's narrative tends to loop back on itself circuitously at times, it is unfailingly informative and surprising in its scope: One learns about such diverse matters as penguin life, the China fur trade, the experiences of Charles Darwin, and tsarist geopolitics. Beyond the harrowing adventures one would expect to read about in any narrative of Antarctic discovery, Gurney's articulate story is a welcome portrait of an age driven by great mysteries and simpler technologies than those of today. (drawings, maps, not seen)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-393-03949-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1996
Another full-scale biography, this one translated from the German, of the preeminent physicist of modern times. Fîlsing (head of science for the North German Radio/Television Network) recognizes that Albert Einstein (18791955) was a complex man whose importance went far beyond his enormous contributions to science. However, as the author (himself a physicist by training) points out, physics was Einstein's ``passion and his life,'' and many of the other events of his life—his involvement in politics, his celebrity status, his efforts on behalf of the Jewish people- -were more in the nature of distractions from his true calling. So while the present volume does not skimp in its treatment of Einstein's life outside science, physics provides the central focus—and, unfortunately, its central weakness. Readers without considerable scientific background may feel that Fîlsing fails to adequately explain many of the central questions to which Einstein addressed himself. On the other hand, Fîlsing offers a fascinating picture of the life of a scientist in the first half of this century. Einstein's school career, his job at the Swiss patent office, his movement into the academic world (and the political maneuvers this involved), and his acceptance by the international scientific community are covered in marvelous detail. Einstein's private life has been the subject of some controversy; however, despite having access to many previously unpublished letters, Fîlsing has little to contribute to such questions as whether Einstein's first wife, Mileva, had any substantial input into the theory of relativity. Einstein's later years, from the accession of Hitler in 1933 to the scientist's death, are given remarkably short shrift. The translation, with numerous muddy patches and unidiomatic translations, often falls short of clarity. While it sheds interesting light on many aspects of Einstein's life, this biography will be of more interest to the specialist than to the general reader.
Pub Date: March 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-670-85545-6
Page Count: 928
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1997
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