In a riveting account both beautiful and shocking, Bevis (English/Univ. of Montana) travels upriver in Borneo to witness the destruction of the world's oldest rain forests and one of the world's oldest cultures. Few Europeans, and fewer environmentalists, have traveled to Sarawak's interior to gain a firsthand understanding of how the Penan, the region's indigenous forest people, have fallen prey to a cabal of Japanese investors, Chinese-owned logging companies, and shortsighted, greedy, Malaysian bureaucrats. A gifted, modest, and fair-minded writer, Bevis befriends a young Penan and voyages up the Baram River by motorboat to meet with his people in their longhouses, as well as to visit Japanese-managed logging camps. He finds that the Penan are paid less than one-tenth of one percent of the gross proceeds from the destruction of their forests; that the unanimous verdict of the Malaysian government and of Japanese capitalists is that native people of Sarawak have no rights to their land; that while sustained yield for the forest is 8 million board-feet per year, 16 million board-feet are cut annually; and that the headmen of the longhouses are routinely bribed by Japanese managers to consent to their sections of forest being cut down. Lest readers regard this as a tragic but distant calamity, Bevis notes that Mitsubishi and other Japanese concerns are purchasing timber concessions in Canada and Brazil with the same voracious appetite displayed in Sarawak. Quite beyond this study of capitalist greed, however, Bevis displays a poetic naturalist's eye in describing the lush landscape and its welcoming people and provides interesting historical insights into the imperiled land. An absorbing, well-documented work that is of extreme and immediate relevance to both Third and First World peoples. (8 illustrations and maps, not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-295-97416-8
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Univ. of Washington
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1995
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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