A snappy contemplation of extinction and beating the odds, and how ordinary folk can do the extraordinary if they know when...
Kooky, clever thoughts on extinction, with an emphasis on the species known as the Pere David deer.
By a.d. 800, the milu, or Pere David deer, lived nowhere except in the forbidden game park of the Emperor of China. The creature seemed a worthy topic, journalist Twigger (Angry White Pajamas) and his agent agreed, so the author set out to investigate, and what he wound up with is a mélange: his figuring out, often in dark humor, how to proceed; his research on the Pere David (he gets snubbed by the world’s expert); background work on the man Pere David and how he spirited a herd of the deer from China to France, how the herd found a home at the Duke of Bedford’s Woburn Abbey, and how the fallout from the Boxer Rebellion turned China’s Pere Davids into spit roasts. Twigger gives the Pere Davids their due: fanciful creatures “with the tail of a donkey, the head of a deer, the neck of a camel . . . and the hooves of a cow . . .” He even travels to China to see them (though Bedfordshire had healthier specimens), but then extinction fast becomes his more beguiling topic: he touches on nuclear war, a book that gets mis-shelved in a library, the warped notions of the Extinction Club, the good/bad/ugly of survivorhood, even the words writers dread when the publisher’s warehouse calls: “You’re pulped, mate.” Short chapters here can have the quality of beautiful postage stamps, miniatures of subjects, despite their sometimes only tangential relevance to the subject of extinction, let alone of milu—the Bodleian Library, for example, or Deep Time, or a timeless summer afternoon (“the kind . . . that is done nowhere better than Oxford”).
A snappy contemplation of extinction and beating the odds, and how ordinary folk can do the extraordinary if they know when to make the effort.Pub Date: July 9, 2002
ISBN: 0-688-17539-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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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