First-rate in every regard: to be put alongside such classics on the region as Through Khiva to Golden Samarkand and The...
A literate, elegiac account of travels in the outback of Uzbekistan, tracing the origins and consequences of one of the world’s most devastating ecological disasters.
Debut author Bissell’s wanderings in Central Asia begin in an ancient outpost of civilization: the old stone city of Tashkent, to which the author had first come in the mid-1990s as a Peace Corps volunteer but had abruptly fled in the midst of an odd personal crisis (“My reasons for leaving were emotional and complicated. In other words, I lost my mind”). But, deeply affected by the place and its people, Bissell braved a return to document the death of the Aral Sea, now little more than a salty puddle between two great deserts. What caused its demise is complicated, too, but much can be explained by the Soviet-era reliance on cotton and rice cultivation and on damming every free-flowing river in sight. And the sea is well and truly dead, Bissell writes by way of conclusion: “The sea was not coming back, nothing would improve . . . until, one day, the Aral Sea would be spoken of in the doomed, sepulchral tones of Gomorrah, Pompeii, or one of The Tempest’s ‘still-vexed Bermudas.’ ” But Bissell offers much more than a chronicle of ecocide; he delivers a travelogue as well, with a lively portrait of a part of the world that few Americans (but, oddly enough, planeloads of Germans) come to visit. Along the way, with nods to classical English and Russian literature and to pop culture, he explores the history of a nation now struggling to overcome a legacy of totalitarian rule—and in the bargain delivers a stinging critique of contemporary clash-of-civilizations writer Robert Kaplan’s account of Uzbekistan, marked by “an almost perverse freedom to pinion entire cultures based upon how his morning has gone.”
First-rate in every regard: to be put alongside such classics on the region as Through Khiva to Golden Samarkand and The Road to Oxiana.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-42130-0
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2003
Whether you call this a personal story or nature writing, it’s poignant, thoughtful and moving—and likely to become a...
An inspired, beautiful and absorbing account of a woman battling grief—with a goshawk.
Following the sudden death of her father, Macdonald (History and Philosophy/Cambridge Univ.; Falcon, 2006, etc.) tried staving off deep depression with a unique form of personal therapy: the purchase and training of an English goshawk, which she named Mabel. Although a trained falconer, the author chose a raptor both unfamiliar and unpredictable, a creature of mad confidence that became a means of working against madness. “The hawk was everything I wanted to be: solitary, self-possessed, free from grief, and numb to the hurts of human life,” she writes. As a devotee of birds of prey since girlhood, Macdonald knew the legends and the literature, particularly the cautionary example of The Once and Future King author T.H. White, whose 1951 book The Goshawk details his own painful battle to master his title subject. Macdonald dramatically parallels her own story with White’s, achieving a remarkable imaginative sympathy with the writer, a lonely, tormented homosexual fighting his own sadomasochistic demons. Even as she was learning from White’s mistakes, she found herself very much in his shoes, watching her life fall apart as the painfully slow bonding process with Mabel took over. Just how much do animals and humans have in common? The more Macdonald got to know her, the more Mabel confounded her notions about what the species was supposed to represent. Is a hawk a symbol of might or independence, or is that just our attempt to remake the animal world in our own image? Writing with breathless urgency that only rarely skirts the melodramatic, Macdonald broadens her scope well beyond herself to focus on the antagonism between people and the environment.
Whether you call this a personal story or nature writing, it’s poignant, thoughtful and moving—and likely to become a classic in either genre.Pub Date: March 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0802123411
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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