A thoughtful account of the timber wolf's return to the Northern Rockies. ``It has been sixty years, thirty wolf generations, since the last wolf pups were poisoned in the Yellowstone,'' writes McNamee (A Story of Deep Delight, 1990). Led by an activist group called the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, of which McNamee is a past president, biologists successfully pressed to undo the destruction of this predator, which had played an essential role in the health of the Yellowstone ecosystem. That effort, he writes, involved a huge campaign to raise public awareness and to enlist the support of private individuals, and it worked. Interior Department hearings on reintroduction produced some 160,000 letters from across the country, ``the biggest official citizen response to any federal action ever.'' Not all those responses were favorable, and much of McNamee's account is given to studying the divisive politics of reintroduction, in which environmentalists squared off against so-called Wise Use movement activists in court and on the streets. Those political debates heated up when fewer than a dozen wolves were finally released in Yellowstone National Park two years ago; not long afterward, one of them was shot down by a pair of local yahoos, one of whom served six months in jail for the crime. The surviving wolves have established themselves in their former habitat and appear to be thriving, although thanks to political pressure from opponents, federal support for the reintroduction program has shriveled. McNamee peppers his episodic narrative with asides about his travels in central Italy, where a similar reintroduction program is taking place, and looks at other efforts elsewhere in the US. A good one-volume reference for fans of Canis lupus, although the story has been widely reported elsewhere, such as in Rick McIntyre's War Against the Wolf.
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-8050-3101-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1997
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION | NATURE
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A New York Times columnist and editorial board member delivers a slim book for aspiring writers, offering saws and sense, wisdom and waggery, biases and biting sarcasm.
Klinkenborg (Timothy; or, Notes of an Abject Reptile, 2006), who’s taught for decades, endeavors to keep things simple in his prose, and he urges other writers to do the same. (Note: He despises abuses of the word as, as he continually reminds readers.) In the early sections, the author ignores traditional paragraphing so that the text resembles a long free-verse poem. He urges readers to use short, clear sentences and to make sure each one is healthy before moving on; notes that it’s acceptable to start sentences with and and but; sees benefits in diagramming sentences; stresses that all writing is revision; periodically blasts the formulaic writing that many (most?) students learn in school; argues that knowing where you’re headed before you begin might be good for a vacation, but not for a piece of writing; and believes that writers must trust readers more, and trust themselves. Most of Klinkenborg’s advice is neither radical nor especially profound (“Turn to the poets. / Learn from them”), and the text suffers from a corrosive fallacy: that if his strategies work for him they will work for all. The final fifth of the text includes some passages from writers he admires (McPhee, Oates, Cheever) and some of his students’ awkward sentences, which he treats analytically but sometimes with a surprising sarcasm that veers near meanness. He includes examples of students’ dangling modifiers, malapropisms, errors of pronoun agreement, wordiness and other mistakes.
Analyzing his craft, a careful craftsman urges with Thoreauvian conviction that writers should simplify, simplify, simplify.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-307-26634-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2012
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
With this detailed, versatile cookbook, readers can finally make Momofuku Milk Bar’s inventive, decadent desserts at home, or see what they’ve been missing.
In this successor to the Momofuku cookbook, Momofuku Milk Bar’s pastry chef hands over the keys to the restaurant group’s snack-food–based treats, which have had people lining up outside the door of the Manhattan bakery since it opened. The James Beard Award–nominated Tosi spares no detail, providing origin stories for her popular cookies, pies and ice-cream flavors. The recipes are meticulously outlined, with added tips on how to experiment with their format. After “understanding how we laid out this cookbook…you will be one of us,” writes the author. Still, it’s a bit more sophisticated than the typical Betty Crocker fare. In addition to a healthy stock of pretzels, cornflakes and, of course, milk powder, some recipes require readers to have feuilletine and citric acid handy, to perfect the art of quenelling. Acolytes should invest in a scale, thanks to Tosi’s preference of grams (“freedom measurements,” as the friendlier cups and spoons are called, are provided, but heavily frowned upon)—though it’s hard to be too pretentious when one of your main ingredients is Fruity Pebbles. A refreshing, youthful cookbook that will have readers happily indulging in a rising pastry-chef star’s widely appealing treats.
Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-72049-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Clarkson Potter
Review Posted Online: Jan. 13, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2011
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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