by Ron Naveen ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 1999
Their behavior might be comedic for us, but for penguins it translates into sex, food, and turf warfare, as explained by field researcher Naveen in this tenderhearted profile of the short-feathered denizens of the far south. What propels Naveen’s newest book (after Wild Ice, not reviewed) is a three-cylinder engine: He wants to make the reader as envious as possible of his penguin-chasing field days on the Antarctic Peninsula and the South Shetland Islands; to smite the reader with the same bewitchment he feels in a gentoo or chinstrap’s presence; and incidentally to present a brief history of penguin research in the Antarctic, starting informally with sealers and formally with Louis Gain and the Second French Antarctic Expedition. It’s a successful formula for anyone at all interested in kneeless, tux-clad bird life. A penguin field man, Naveen is there to observe and record how they “find mates, set up shop, court, lay eggs, raise chicks, and then get out before frigid weather locks in once again.” Although penguins are hardwired for predictable behavior, with little intuitive freedom, this lack of surprise is fashioned by Naveen into meaningful qualities: the penguin as messenger of environmental tidings, and the penguin as symbol of what it means to live in synch with the earth, and how we as a species fall short in comparison. Naveen knows when to turn loose penguin facts and figures, and he knows how to rein them in. He also knows how to lightly delineate a landscape of thousands upon thousands of the black-and-white, upright, animated birds set against a green and pink mountainside on a scale so vast it steals your breath away. Then again, he closes every chapter with juddering empurpled wordplay that can thankfully be seen coming and thus avoided. Naveen knows and loves his subject—he is the first to admit that he is never happier than when mired in penguin guano—and he writes of it and its place with uncommon fluency. (color photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-688-15894-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1998
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by Hope Jahren ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 5, 2016
Jahren transcends both memoir and science writing in this literary fusion of both genres.
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Award-winning scientist Jahren (Geology and Geophysics/Univ. of Hawaii) delivers a personal memoir and a paean to the natural world.
The author’s father was a physics and earth science teacher who encouraged her play in the laboratory, and her mother was a student of English literature who nurtured her love of reading. Both of these early influences engrossingly combine in this adroit story of a dedication to science. Jahren’s journey from struggling student to struggling scientist has the narrative tension of a novel and characters she imbues with real depth. The heroes in this tale are the plants that the author studies, and throughout, she employs her facility with words to engage her readers. We learn much along the way—e.g., how the willow tree clones itself, the courage of a seed’s first root, the symbiotic relationship between trees and fungi, and the airborne signals used by trees in their ongoing war against insects. Trees are of key interest to Jahren, and at times she waxes poetic: “Each beginning is the end of a waiting. We are each given exactly one chance to be. Each of us is both impossible and inevitable. Every replete tree was first a seed that waited.” The author draws many parallels between her subjects and herself. This is her story, after all, and we are engaged beyond expectation as she relates her struggle in building and running laboratory after laboratory at the universities that have employed her. Present throughout is her lab partner, a disaffected genius named Bill, whom she recruited when she was a graduate student at Berkeley and with whom she’s worked ever since. The author’s tenacity, hope, and gratitude are all evident as she and Bill chase the sweetness of discovery in the face of the harsh economic realities of the research scientist.
Jahren transcends both memoir and science writing in this literary fusion of both genres.Pub Date: April 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-87493-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
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by Jennifer Ackerman ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 12, 2016
Ackerman writes with a light but assured touch, her prose rich in fact but economical in delivering it. Fans of birds in all...
Science writer Ackerman (Ah-Choo!: The Uncommon Life of Your Common Cold, 2010, etc.) looks at the new science surrounding avian intelligence.
The takeaway: calling someone a birdbrain is a compliment. And in any event, as Ackerman observes early on, “intelligence is a slippery concept, even in our own species, tricky to define and tricky to measure.” Is a bird that uses a rock to break open a clamshell the mental equivalent of a tool-using primate? Perhaps that’s the wrong question, for birds are so unlike humans that “it’s difficult for us to fully appreciate their mental capabilities,” given that they’re really just small, feathered dinosaurs who inhabit a wholly different world from our once-arboreal and now terrestrial one. Crows and other corvids have gotten all the good publicity related to bird intelligence in recent years, but Ackerman, who does allow that some birds are brighter than others, points favorably to the much-despised pigeon as an animal that “can remember hundreds of different objects for long periods of time, discriminate between different painting styles, and figure out where it’s going, even when displaced from familiar territory by hundreds of miles.” Not bad for a critter best known for bespattering statues in public parks. Ackerman travels far afield to places such as Barbados and New Caledonia to study such matters as memory, communication, and decision-making, the last largely based on visual cues—though, as she notes, birds also draw ably on other senses, including smell, which in turn opens up insight onto “a weird evolutionary paradox that scientists have puzzled over for more than a decade”—a matter of the geometry of, yes, the bird brain.
Ackerman writes with a light but assured touch, her prose rich in fact but economical in delivering it. Fans of birds in all their diversity will want to read this one.Pub Date: April 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59420-521-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
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by Jennifer Ackerman illustrated by John Burgoyne
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