Kudos are due for recovering the story of a larger-than-life woman and her tiny, famous panda bear.
The Boston Globe’s “Animal Beat” columnist tells the story of Ruth Harkness, the explorer who brought America its first panda bear.
When her husband died while exploring China, Harkness—a woman who brooked no fools and met the world armed with the wit of Dorothy Parker—decided to take up his goal and capture a live panda. In 1936, she traveled to China and set out for panda territory, literally wearing her dead husband’s clothes and boots (which had been refitted for the widow by Chinese tailors and shoemakers). Croke (The Modern Ark, 1997) recounts the expedition in all its exciting and exhausting detail: risky crossings of the Yangtze, bandits trying to attack the explorers. If danger was in the air, so was Eros, and Harkness had a fling in the mountains with her hunky expedition guide, Quentin Young. On November 9, she and Young found their baby panda. Harkness named the three-pounder Su-Lin, which translates as “a little bit of something very cute.” Harkness fed Su-Lin from a baby bottle and hardly let the bear out of her sight as she traveled back to Shanghai and then on to America. The pair, lady and panda, made a media sensation (Su-Lin graced the front page of The Chicago Tribune for nine days in a row). Clever capitalists marketed toy pandas, which could be had for $2.50, and Harkness eventually settled Su-Lin at the Brookfield Zoo. Croke chronicles Harkness’s subsequent journeys back to China, her eventual slide into alcoholism, and her mysterious death in a hotel bathtub in 1947. But she and Su-Lin had a long-lasting impact: the adorable panda galvanized more conservationism than a thousand speeches by activists ever could. “Every time a biologist treks into the bamboo forest, or a conservation group underwrites research,” writes Croke, “Harkness’s mission lives on.”
Kudos are due for recovering the story of a larger-than-life woman and her tiny, famous panda bear.Pub Date: July 5, 2005
ISBN: 0-375-50783-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
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
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
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