Bird lovers and fans of well-written science history will love this revelatory and intoxicating biography.
An impressive biography of the “man who began the scientific study of birds.”
Birkhead (Animal Behavior and History of Science/Univ. of Sheffield; The Most Perfect Thing: Inside (and Outside) a Bird’s Egg, 2016, etc.) studies the life and work of a birder who was in the “right place at the right time,” Francis Willughby (1635-1672). With his good friend and tutor at Trinity College, John Ray, the two formed “one of the great partnerships in biology.” After Willughby’s death at the age of 36, Ray went on to edit and publish Willughby’s three massive, major scientific studies in Latin of fish, insects, and his “blockbuster,” Ornithology. Until now, Ray’s contributions have historically overshadowed Willughby’s. Thanks to the availability of new primary source materials, Birkhead is able to provide a “far more complete portrait” of the man who formed the foundation of a new type of natural history in general and ornithology in particular. A member of the landed gentry, Willughby received a superb university education while the scientific revolution of the 17th century was in full bloom. With a novelist’s flair for narrative, Birkhead recounts the young man’s many adventures on expeditions, often accompanied by Ray, and his groundbreaking discoveries. He describes Willughby as industrious, enthusiastic, and “evidently a nice man.” But it’s his scientific accomplishments that interest the author the most. In great detail, he examines Willughby’s vast research in fish species, bird reproduction, migration, feathers, insects, sap, classifications, chemistry, and even “a book of games.” Birkhead describes examining Willughby’s large specimen case with 1,200 compartments and finding not just a vast collection of seeds, but also 133 eggs: “During my research career I have had a few Eureka moments, but this was one of the best.”
Bird lovers and fans of well-written science history will love this revelatory and intoxicating biography.Pub Date: July 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4088-7848-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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