Both a briskly guided tour of a fading industry and a vibrant example of self-discovery.
A successful art enthusiast finds his true calling in the quest for dinosaur remains.
At age 50, author and art columnist Polsky (I Sold Andy Warhol (Too Soon), 2009, etc.) took a good look at his extensive yet stagnant 25-year career as an art dealer and decided to dive into his true life’s passion of dinosaur exploration. To realize his goal of unearthing the skeletal remains of a Tyrannosaurus rex, the author enlisted the aid of seasoned paleontologist Henry Galiano, who cautioned him about the competitiveness of the dinosaur-hunting community. Galiano officially navigated Polsky through his first trade convention, and the author met with commercial fossil dealer Mike Triebold, “fossil king” Bob Detrich and Maurice Williams, the owner of the land where the legendary “Sue” T-rex skeleton was excavated in 1990. When Galiano and fellow paleontologist Peter Larson declined to participate in his frenzied endeavor, Polsky was crestfallen, especially when his luck (and time) ran out while scraping across Williams’ hallowed property in the South Dakota badlands. Exasperated yet undeterred, the author regrouped with an overconfident Detrich to assemble a ragtag party of die-hard fossil hunters (“boneheads”), including a pair of bickering fraternal twin brothers and rancher Bucky Derflinger, who became the youngest person to discover (and sell) a T. rex. Polsky takes distinct delight in writing about the history of paleontology, pricey dinosaur casts, a rumored T. rex “curse” and the general frustration felt when confronted with a declining seller’s market due to the saturation of online marketplaces. Whether successful or not, the author’s fortitude remains palpable. He writes with earnest and lighthearted exuberance, expressing an obvious love of the hunt, even during the most hopeless moments of his spirited adventure.
Both a briskly guided tour of a fading industry and a vibrant example of self-discovery.Pub Date: April 15, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-57178-253-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Council Oak
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Whether you call this a personal story or nature writing, it’s poignant, thoughtful and moving—and likely to become a...
An inspired, beautiful and absorbing account of a woman battling grief—with a goshawk.
Following the sudden death of her father, Macdonald (History and Philosophy/Cambridge Univ.; Falcon, 2006, etc.) tried staving off deep depression with a unique form of personal therapy: the purchase and training of an English goshawk, which she named Mabel. Although a trained falconer, the author chose a raptor both unfamiliar and unpredictable, a creature of mad confidence that became a means of working against madness. “The hawk was everything I wanted to be: solitary, self-possessed, free from grief, and numb to the hurts of human life,” she writes. As a devotee of birds of prey since girlhood, Macdonald knew the legends and the literature, particularly the cautionary example of The Once and Future King author T.H. White, whose 1951 book The Goshawk details his own painful battle to master his title subject. Macdonald dramatically parallels her own story with White’s, achieving a remarkable imaginative sympathy with the writer, a lonely, tormented homosexual fighting his own sadomasochistic demons. Even as she was learning from White’s mistakes, she found herself very much in his shoes, watching her life fall apart as the painfully slow bonding process with Mabel took over. Just how much do animals and humans have in common? The more Macdonald got to know her, the more Mabel confounded her notions about what the species was supposed to represent. Is a hawk a symbol of might or independence, or is that just our attempt to remake the animal world in our own image? Writing with breathless urgency that only rarely skirts the melodramatic, Macdonald broadens her scope well beyond herself to focus on the antagonism between people and the environment.
Whether you call this a personal story or nature writing, it’s poignant, thoughtful and moving—and likely to become a classic in either genre.Pub Date: March 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0802123411
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Exemplary writing about the world and a welcome gift to readers.
Distinguished natural history writer and explorer Lopez (Outside, 2014, etc.) builds a winning memoir around books, voyages, and biological and anthropological observations.
“Traveling, despite the technological innovations that have brought cultural homogenization to much of the world, helps the curious and attentive itinerant understand how deep the notion goes that one place is never actually like another.” So writes the author, who has made a long career of visiting remote venues such as Antarctica, Greenland, and the lesser known of the Galápagos Islands. From these travels he has extracted truths about the world, such as the fact that places differ as widely as the people who live in them. Even when traveling with scientists from his own culture, Lopez finds differences of perception. On an Arctic island called Skraeling, for instance, he observes that if he and the biologists he is walking with were to encounter a grizzly feeding on a caribou, he would focus on the bear, the scientists on the whole gestalt of bear, caribou, environment; if a native of the place were along, the story would deepen beyond the immediate event, for those who possess Indigenous ways of knowledge, “unlike me…felt no immediate need to resolve it into meaning.” The author’s chapter on talismans—objects taken from his travels, such as “a fist-size piece of raven-black dolerite”—is among the best things he has written. But there are plentiful gems throughout the looping narrative, its episodes constructed from adventures over eight decades: trying to work out a bit of science as a teenager while huddled under the Ponte Vecchio after just having seen Botticelli’s Venus; admiring a swimmer as a septuagenarian while remembering the John Steinbeck whom he’d met as a schoolboy; gazing into the surf over many years’ worth of trips to Cape Foulweather, an Oregon headland named by Capt. James Cook, of whom he writes, achingly, “we no longer seem to be sailing in a time of fixed stars, of accurate chronometers, and of reliable routes.”
Exemplary writing about the world and a welcome gift to readers.Pub Date: March 20, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-394-58582-6
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
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