by Richard Ellis ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 17, 2008
An artful, detailed account of the tuna, and an entreaty that this not be its swan song.
Smooth-flowing distillation of scholarship about “the world’s best-loved fish.”
Ellis (Singing Whales and Flying Squid: The Discovery of Marine Life, 2006, etc.) has an authorial voice that’s easy on the ear and unpresumptuously authoritative. He takes readers through the many varieties of tuna: albacore, longtail, bigeye, blackfin, yellowfin, skipjack (not really a tuna, but the chicken-of-the-sea that fills many a light-meat tuna can) and the great, paradigmatic bluefin. Ranging as widely as the fish itself, Ellis covers tuna’s history as an item of catch (it was once scorned, ground up for its oil and for cat food), its lure for such sport fishermen as Zane Grey, its migratory patterns, metabolism and eyesight. He delves into the strangely fascinating canning process: Caught, frozen, thawed, gilled and gutted, the tuna is then frozen again, cut, precooked, cooled, skinned, canned, cooked again. The bluefin captures most of Ellis’s attention. Capable of living 30 years, speeding along at 55 miles per hour, weighing in at 1,500 pounds, this delicious, lordly fish is full of health-giving omega-3 fatty acids…and just a soupcon of mercury. It has provoked “the modern-day equivalent of the Dutch tulipmania” in high-end Japanese restaurants, where a two-ounce slice can command $75. But the bluefin is becoming rare due to overfishing. Its economic value is so high that its fate in the wild is nearly a foregone conclusion. That value may encourage tuna ranching, which could help protect brood stock but brings its own nest of troubles: interbreeding, parasites, disease, effluent pollution and gross inefficiency. (Twenty pounds of wild-fish feed produce one pound of tuna meat.) The future, Ellis suggests, lies in conservation, but he fears no one is listening to the convincing doomsday scenarios sketched by environmental groups.
An artful, detailed account of the tuna, and an entreaty that this not be its swan song.Pub Date: July 17, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-307-26715-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2008
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by Patrik Svensson translated by Agnes Broomé ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 5, 2020
Unsentimental nature writing that sheds as much light on humans as on eels.
An account of the mysterious life of eels that also serves as a meditation on consciousness, faith, time, light and darkness, and life and death.
In addition to an intriguing natural history, Swedish journalist Svensson includes a highly personal account of his relationship with his father. The author alternates eel-focused chapters with those about his father, a man obsessed with fishing for this elusive creature. “I can’t recall us ever talking about anything other than eels and how to best catch them, down there by the stream,” he writes. “I can’t remember us speaking at all….Because we were in…a place whose nature was best enjoyed in silence.” Throughout, Svensson, whose beat is not biology but art and culture, fills his account with people: Aristotle, who thought eels emerged live from mud, “like a slithering, enigmatic miracle”; Freud, who as a teenage biologist spent months in Trieste, Italy, peering through a microscope searching vainly for eel testes; Johannes Schmidt, who for two decades tracked thousands of eels, looking for their breeding grounds. After recounting the details of the eel life cycle, the author turns to the eel in literature—e.g., in the Bible, Rachel Carson’s Under the Sea Wind, and Günter Grass’ The Tin Drum—and history. He notes that the Puritans would likely not have survived without eels, and he explores Sweden’s “eel coast” (what it once was and how it has changed), how eel fishing became embroiled in the Northern Irish conflict, and the importance of eel fishing to the Basque separatist movement. The apparent return to life of a dead eel leads Svensson to a consideration of faith and the inherent message of miracles. He warns that if we are to save this fascinating creature from extinction, we must continue to study it. His book is a highly readable place to begin learning.
Unsentimental nature writing that sheds as much light on humans as on eels.Pub Date: May 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-296881-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 29, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
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by Rachel Carson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 27, 1962
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
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