Readers may prefer swimming alone in fin-dotted waters to muddling through this modern horror.
A toothless tale of pelagic terror.
For two weeks in the summer of 1916, as fans of Peter Benchley’s Jaws will recall, New Jersey beachgoers were forced from the water by a roving shark—or, as medical doctor and conservationist Fernicola hazards, a group of sharks—that had chomped five swimmers to death. Already burdened with a polio epidemic and unseasonably hot weather, the state government had its hands full trying not only to find and exterminate the culprit(s), but also to calm panicked hordes of humans. In the first enterprise it may or may not have been successful, since sharks were destroyed wherever they were encountered; time took care of the second task: war and other calamities eventually drove the doings of the New Jersey sharks from the front page. Fernicola relates this history in a manner that is sometimes melodramatic (“modern shark knowledge suggests that the sharks are always there and capable of attacking”), sometimes breezy (“President Wilson was one of the guys to look to for help. Eventually, the House of Representatives would appropriate $5,000 to search for and eradicate the New Jersey shark threat. In those days, five grand was a lot of money”), but never very good. The narrative, though dotted with useful natural-historical information on sharks, is confused, rambling, and repetitive; much of it is given over to determining the identity of the homicidal shark (or sharks) who committed such heinous crimes all those years ago, a forensic exercise of limited utility at best—just where sharks will turn up and what mood they’ll be in are matters subject to many variables, as Fernicola admits, and thus knowing just what kind of shark ate those poor swimmers will not be of much help in protecting modern-day oceangoers from a similarly gruesome fate.
Readers may prefer swimming alone in fin-dotted waters to muddling through this modern horror.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-58574-297-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
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
A quirky wonder of a book.
A Peabody Award–winning NPR science reporter chronicles the life of a turn-of-the-century scientist and how her quest led to significant revelations about the meaning of order, chaos, and her own existence.
Miller began doing research on David Starr Jordan (1851-1931) to understand how he had managed to carry on after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed his work. A taxonomist who is credited with discovering “a full fifth of fish known to man in his day,” Jordan had amassed an unparalleled collection of ichthyological specimens. Gathering up all the fish he could save, Jordan sewed the nameplates that had been on the destroyed jars directly onto the fish. His perseverance intrigued the author, who also discusses the struggles she underwent after her affair with a woman ended a heterosexual relationship. Born into an upstate New York farm family, Jordan attended Cornell and then became an itinerant scholar and field researcher until he landed at Indiana University, where his first ichthyological collection was destroyed by lightning. In between this catastrophe and others involving family members’ deaths, he reconstructed his collection. Later, he was appointed as the founding president of Stanford, where he evolved into a Machiavellian figure who trampled on colleagues and sang the praises of eugenics. Miller concludes that Jordan displayed the characteristics of someone who relied on “positive illusions” to rebound from disaster and that his stand on eugenics came from a belief in “a divine hierarchy from bacteria to humans that point[ed]…toward better.” Considering recent research that negates biological hierarchies, the author then suggests that Jordan’s beloved taxonomic category—fish—does not exist. Part biography, part science report, and part meditation on how the chaos that caused Miller’s existential misery could also bring self-acceptance and a loving wife, this unique book is an ingenious celebration of diversity and the mysterious order that underlies all existence.
A quirky wonder of a book.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6027-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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