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
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
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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