Lyrical and thought-provoking but sometimes convoluted.
A BBC radio producer and nature writer visits four fields in England, Zambia, the Ukraine and the United States to reflect on humanity’s uneasy relationship with both nature and itself.
For Dee (The Running Sky: A Birdwatching Life, 2009), “[f]ields offer the most articulate description and vivid enactment of our life here on earth, of how we live within the grain of the world and against it.” He begins this collection of nine essays with the description of one field he knows best, Burwell Fen in England. An ancient seabed once covered by saltwater, humans learned to drain it and use the land for farming and herding. Ironically, the modern drive to repair damaged ecosystems and return them to their original states has subjected these “natural” spaces to still more human manipulation. Fields in less-developed parts of the world like Zambia have also not been spared from the interfering ways of mankind. All over the African continent, “[h]abitats are being degraded, forests are cut to nothing, lakes fouled, fetid shanties grow as large as cities.” Like the Montana prairie where the 1876 Battle of Little Bighorn took place, fields can also mark historical events, just as they can serve as symbols for the at-times tragic fates of the humans—in this case, the Plains Indians—who inhabit them. They can also suggest the way that nature can mirror mankind’s destructiveness. As the author shows in his essay on the meadows near the Chernobyl nuclear reactor in the Ukraine, the land has become “a sink…[that] takes life in but gives next to no life out.” Sprawling in its descriptions of nature and of the histories that inform each of the places he visits, Dee’s work defies linearity. It is best read as one man’s idiosyncratic prose-poem meditation on the way human activities affect, for better and for worse, the eternal “transubstantiation of the earth.”
Lyrical and thought-provoking but sometimes convoluted.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1619024618
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
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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