Environmental journalist McGraw (The End of Country: Dispatches from the Frack Zone, 2011) engages a handful of citizens—scientists and outdoorsmen, conservative and liberal—to gain a sense of our understanding of climate change.
It comes as no great surprise that climate change remains a contentious issue, drawn as it is from party lines rather than investigation, and the author examines what “may be the most consequential [issue] of our time.” McGraw is an aw-shucks reporter who wears his emotions on his sleeve, and he makes use of hyperbole to make a point, not as a position statement, as do the partisans who have hijacked and stymied the debate. The author may have found that there is reason to despair on the legislative level, but fortunately, he also found more openness to finding common ground among common folks and those who are in the trenches trying to decipher climate change. There is reason to be impressed by the grass-roots response, from evangelical Christians (“our Christian values—to love others as Christ loved us, to love our neighbors as ourselves and to care for creation—demand that Christians take action”) to New Jersey fishermen who have experienced “the increased acidity” of the sea, which is making “oyster shells weaker, while the carbon that caused it seemed to be making the oyster’s deadly enemy, the crab, grow to monstrous size.” Whether it is a freethinking Montana sportsman, a man who has farmed in southern Illinois for the last five decades or scientists—drawn mostly from Pennsylvania State University—who are gathering the data necessary to make informed decisions about how best to proceed, the author provides plenty of reasons for optimism because it is clear that people are not ignoring the issue.
McGraw discovers that the respectful middle of the road is the most likely place to find a bridge to a sustainable energy future.Pub Date: April 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-292-75661-8
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Univ. of Texas
Review Posted Online: Dec. 26, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2015
Categories: NATURE | SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
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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
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | NATURE | SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
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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
Categories: NATURE | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | SURVIVORS & ADVENTURERS | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
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