An appreciative, environmentally sound reminder of how trees benefit and cultivate life on Earth.
A lifelong nature lover explores the versatility of the ash tree.
Journalist and avid cyclist Penn (It’s All about the Bike: The Pursuit of Happiness on Two Wheels, 2011) grew up beneath the shadows of an ash tree and developed an uncanny connection to it: “the gatekeeper to my dreams.” In adulthood, the author lives in a small woodland area in the Black Mountains in Wales, where the ancient, self-propagating ash stands as the third most common broad-leaved variety. Penn celebrates the ash’s usefulness as the building block for ladders, flooring, crutches, shovel handles, and a wide range of furniture; its leaves are also medicinal for humans and nutritious for livestock. Noting how it is supremely practical yet historically undervalued and “reduced in our minds today to a material you burn,” the author comprehensively acknowledges the ash through diligent research, examples of the tree’s historical and social significance, and a series of interviews with master artisans. Penn provides profiles of village craftsmen who use and respect this particular species, including a bowyer, bowl-turner, Austrian toboggan maker, baseball bat manufacturers, and, most fascinatingly, a wheelwright. The author also oversaw the professional felling of a nearby ash in order to execute a “zero-waste policy” in his discovery of how many uses could be achieved from a single tree. Infrequently but no less interestingly, Penn also touches on the more intimate relationship he shares with trees and nature; he regularly enjoys the healing, stress-relieving, and spiritual properties of “forest bathing” (strolling among old growth woodlands), something which soothed the grief of his father’s sudden passing. By the conclusion of his project, Penn found 44 uses for the ash he’d felled. With an arborist mindset and smooth, poetic prose, the author reflects on the usefulness and the living splendor of trees, which he believes “summon us to witness nature; they are closest to its heart.”
An appreciative, environmentally sound reminder of how trees benefit and cultivate life on Earth.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-393-25373-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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