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
The book is not entirely negative; final chapters indicate roads of reversal, before it is too late!
It should come as no surprise that the gifted author of The Sea Around Usand its successors can take another branch of science—that phase of biology indicated by the term ecology—and bring it so sharply into focus that any intelligent layman can understand what she is talking about.
Understand, yes, and shudder, for she has drawn a living portrait of what is happening to this balance nature has decreed in the science of life—and what man is doing (and has done) to destroy it and create a science of death. Death to our birds, to fish, to wild creatures of the woods—and, to a degree as yet undetermined, to man himself. World War II hastened the program by releasing lethal chemicals for destruction of insects that threatened man’s health and comfort, vegetation that needed quick disposal. The war against insects had been under way before, but the methods were relatively harmless to other than the insects under attack; the products non-chemical, sometimes even introduction of other insects, enemies of the ones under attack. But with chemicals—increasingly stronger, more potent, more varied, more dangerous—new chain reactions have set in. And ironically, the insects are winning the war, setting up immunities, and re-emerging, their natural enemies destroyed. The peril does not stop here. Waters, even to the underground water tables, are contaminated; soils are poisoned. The birds consume the poisons in their insect and earthworm diet; the cattle, in their fodder; the fish, in the waters and the food those waters provide. And humans? They drink the milk, eat the vegetables, the fish, the poultry. There is enough evidence to point to the far-reaching effects; but this is only the beginning,—in cancer, in liver disorders, in radiation perils…This is the horrifying story. It needed to be told—and by a scientist with a rare gift of communication and an overwhelming sense of responsibility. Already the articles taken from the book for publication in The New Yorkerare being widely discussed. Book-of-the-Month distribution in October will spread the message yet more widely.
The book is not entirely negative; final chapters indicate roads of reversal, before it is too late!Pub Date: Sept. 27, 1962
ISBN: 061825305X
Page Count: 378
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1962
APPRECIATIONS
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
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