A cautiously hopeful and well-researched tribute to an animal easy for most humans to love.
A Rhode Island–based science writer explores the recovery from possible extinction of what may be “the cutest animal on earth.”
These animals, writes McLeish (Narwhals: Arctic Whales in a Melting World, 2015, etc.), don't just look cuddly and have a delightful ability to use tools; they also help maintain the marine environment where they live. After their numbers were severely cut by fur trading, the crucial kelp forests where the otters hunted suffered significant damage by sea urchins, the otters’ preferred food. With the otters back again, the kelp ecosystems flourished. Sea otters are a well-studied species, and the author devotes chapters to time spent with researchers along the Pacific coast from Alaska to California. He sailed out with spotters to count otters, and, in “the most precious fifteen minutes of my year,” he observed a rescued otter pup being groomed by an aquarium worker. He attended “necropsies” intended to reveal why otters have died and was appalled to learn how many females are killed during mating. McLeish also considers, though doesn't adopt, the viewpoints of those who consider sea otters “the rats of the sea.” Native Americans in Alaska, as well as other fishermen along the northern Pacific coast, are frustrated by the fact that animals left to range by the Marine Mammal Protection Act are devouring the same invertebrates the fishermen would like to harvest and sell. McLeish smoothly integrates background about the animals into his narrative, and he works in details about the history of their interaction with humans over the past few decades. Some of those attempts to save the otters, such as the introduction of surrogate mothers, have succeeded; others, such as relocation, haven't been as successful. The author also explains the complications of the relationships among the various protected marine mammals: in some places, the main enemy of the otters is the killer whale.
A cautiously hopeful and well-researched tribute to an animal easy for most humans to love.Pub Date: March 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63217-137-5
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Sasquatch
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
A quirky wonder of a book.
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
BOOK REVIEW
This is our life, these are our lighted seasons, and then we die. . . . In the meantime, in between time, we can see. . . we can work at making sense of (what) we see. . . to discover where we so incontrovertibly are. It's common sense; when you-move in, you try to learn the neighborhood." Dillard's "neighborhood" is hilly Virginia country where she lived alone, but essentially it is all those "shreds of creation" with which every human is surrounded, which she is trying to learn, to know — from finite variations to infinite possibilities of being and meaning. A tall order and Dillard doesn't quite fill it. She is too impatient to get about the soul's adventures to stay long with an egg-laying grasshopper, or other bits of flora and fauna, and her snatches from physics and biological/metaphysical studies are this side of frivolous. However, Ms. Dillard has a great deal going for her — in spite of some repetition of words and concepts, her prose is bright, fresh and occasionally emulates (not imitates) the Walden Master in a contemporary context: "Trees. . . extend impressively in both directions, . . . shearing rock and fanning air, doing their real business just out of reach." She has set herself no less a task than understanding emotionally, spiritually and intellectually the force of the creative extravagance of the universe in all its beauty and horhor ("There is a terrible innocence in the benumbed world of the lower animals, reducing life to a universal chomp.") Experience can be focused, and awareness sharpened, by a kind of meditative high. Thus this becomes somewhat exhausting reading, if taken in toto, but even if Dillard's reach exceeds her grasp, her sights are leagues higher than that of Anne Morrow Lindbergh's Gift from the Sea, regretfully (re her sex), the inevitable comparison.
Pub Date: March 13, 1974
ISBN: 0061233323
Page Count: -
Publisher: Harper's Magazine Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1974
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