Fiennes seems mightily preoccupied throughout his narrative, but he never articulates exactly with what. As a result, it’s...
A vaguely eccentric journey on the trail of the snow goose, from British newcomer Fiennes (Granta, TLS, the London Review of Books, etc.).
Recovering from an unspecified illness at his childhood home outside Oxford, the 26-year-old Fiennes finds himself taken with the local birds, in particular with their freedom that contrasts so sharply with his bed-bound state. The snow goose, with which he had some bookish acquaintance in his youth, strikes his fancy. Longing to be free of his confinement, Fiennes experiences some of the bird’s migratory restlessness and when released hops a plane to Texas, where the snow goose winters. There, he begins his travels with the bird—a journey that will take him all the way to its Baffin Island breeding ground. As Fiennes haltingly pushes north, up through the Dakotas and Manitoba, past Churchill and the Hudson Bay to Foxe Land, he fills his story with the bulging bag of tricks birds use to get where they’re going: their grand circadian and circannual rhythms, their sun and stellar compasses, their sense of magnetic fields. The author has a tendency to overportray his human traveling companions, people he meets along the way (a woman on a bus, a family he stays with), who aren’t as interesting as the space they command, but he can turn a lovely phrase: when he pulls a book from the shelf, “the books on either side of it leaned together like hands in prayer,” and a heron lifts off, “its wings making the whup-whup of someone walking in a sarong.” Meantime, the farther afield Fiennes goes, the more his thoughts drift from migration to homesickness and nostalgia. “My journey north with the snow geese was not quite the shout of freedom I had presupposed,” he concludes rather rapidly, anxious to get home long before we really get to know him or understand the discomfiting melancholy he wears like a hair shirt.
Fiennes seems mightily preoccupied throughout his narrative, but he never articulates exactly with what. As a result, it’s difficult to get a grip on anything here, and The Snow Geese makes no lasting impact.Pub Date: Feb. 19, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-50729-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
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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