The story of the creatures great and small who have graced the planet then and now, and of the scientists who have studied them, marvelously told by a senior paleontologist at London’s Natural History Museum. No armchair analyst, Fortey punctuates his narrative with vivid personal accounts of his own experiences, beginning as a Cambridge undergraduate when he collected fossil trilobites along a fierce and windswept shore in Spitzbergen. What follows are richly detailed chapters that chronicle the emergence of algae and other one-cell plants that populated the oceans, creating a groundswell of nutrients and sediments vital to life at all successive stages. He is quick to acknowledge the role of chance, the possibility that later life forms might have been completely different had one or another earlier organism held sway. He also neatly dispatches common errors, such as Hoyle’s panspermia theory. He deals with human origins with equal finesse, giving credit to important research, putting past controversies about evolution into cultural context, and reminding us that new discoveries may rewrite ideas about human evolution yet again. Fortey’s narrative offers a number of wonderful set-pieces, including his description of the explosion of new life forms during the Cambrian era. And he nicely mingles small, telling details with a clear overview, as in his description of the fossil record in the British county of Devon, whose lake and mountain basin deposits offer “a kind of temporal schizophrenia” (which defines the “Devonian” period when life moved landward). “There is sight and insight,” Fortey comments admiringly about a colleague at one point. The same can be said about Fortey himself. His wonderful description of the emergence and proliferation of life on earth combines the vision of a scientist with an intimate knowledge of the fossil record with the insight of a scholar for masterful interpretation. (24 pages photos, not seen) (Book-of-the-Month Club main selection)
Pub Date: April 7, 1998
ISBN: 0-375-40119-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Drawings, words, and a few photos combine to convey the depth of a tragedy that would leave most people dumbstruck.
A new life and book arise from the ashes of a devastating California wildfire.
These days, it seems the fires will never end. They wreaked destruction over central California in the latter months of 2018, dominating headlines for weeks, barely a year after Fies (Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow?, 2009) lost nearly everything to the fires that raged through Northern California. The result is a vividly journalistic graphic narrative of resilience in the face of tragedy, an account of recent history that seems timely as ever. “A two-story house full of our lives was a two-foot heap of dead smoking ash,” writes the author about his first return to survey the damage. The matter-of-fact tone of the reportage makes some of the flights of creative imagination seem more extraordinary—particularly a nihilistic, two-page centerpiece of a psychological solar system in which “the fire is our black hole,” and “some veer too near and are drawn into despair, depression, divorce, even suicide,” while “others are gravitationally flung entirely out of our solar system to other cities or states, and never seen again.” Yet the stories that dominate the narrative are those of the survivors, who were part of the community and would be part of whatever community would be built to take its place across the charred landscape. Interspersed with the author’s own account are those from others, many retirees, some suffering from physical or mental afflictions. Each is rendered in a couple pages of text except one from a fellow cartoonist, who draws his own. The project began with an online comic when Fies did the only thing he could as his life was reduced to ash and rubble. More than 3 million readers saw it; this expanded version will hopefully extend its reach.
Drawings, words, and a few photos combine to convey the depth of a tragedy that would leave most people dumbstruck.Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4197-3585-1
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Abrams ComicArts
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
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