by Robert Michael Pyle ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 27, 2010
The narrative is not just a sweet, unhurried travelogue; it can easily be used as a guidebook, as Pyle is scrupulous in...
Ecologist Pyle (Sky Time in Gray’s River: Living for Keeps in a Forgotten Place, 2007, etc.) goes in search of as many butterfly species as he can find north of the Mexican border during 2008.
The author took the notion of a “Big Year” from birding—to find, experience and identify as many of the creatures as one could in a single year. He is a low-tech guy, using just his old binoculars, butterfly nets, jalopy and good old-fashioned sense of adventure and wonder. An enthusiastic guide, Pyle chronicles 14 journeys from his house in southwest Washington. He stops frequently to smell the coffee and check out the roadside fennel for anise swallowtails, and he follows hunches, intuition and happenstance, all thoroughly primed by his deep schooling in butterflies. But the author is tuned into more than just his metalmarks, duskywings and checkerspots. After all, there’s plenty more in the natural world to observe and remark upon, including countless other species of flora and fauna, strange foods and local ales, run-ins with the Border Patrol, odd encounters, stormy weather and bites of regional history. He travels on a shoestring, meanders freely and maintains an unjaded pleasure in simple pleasures, like a goatweed emperor flying alongside his car somewhere in Arkansas, and helpful friends along the way. Though he finds his share of habitat destruction and larvae being killed off by mosquito fogging in the wake of the West Nile virus, he encounters a healthy number and variety of butterflies.
The narrative is not just a sweet, unhurried travelogue; it can easily be used as a guidebook, as Pyle is scrupulous in detailing where and when he found each of the butterflies.Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-618-94539-9
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2010
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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 Brian Fies illustrated by Brian Fies ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 5, 2019
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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