An engrossing read with an urgent message about the next frontier of disease.
A fascinating look at infectious fungi, “the most devastating disease agents on the planet.”
A former toxicologist and author of Unnatural Selection, Monosson begins her latest book with a discussion of Candida auris, a fungal pathogen that was first described in 2009, when it was isolated from the ear of a Japanese woman. Deadly and highly resistant to antifungal drugs, C. auris has recently been flagged by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as a serious global health threat. While it might be new to Homo sapiens, “over the past century,” writes the author, “fungal infections have caused catastrophic losses in other species.” The uptick could be the result of climate change. For mammals, the author explains, the primary line of defense against fungal infection is body temperature, which is too warm for most fungi to thrive. However, a warmer general environment may enable fungi to “evolve a higher temperature tolerance” and “jump the temperature barrier.” Monosson takes readers on a tour of devastation wrought by various fungal pathogens in other species. She follows a biologist who set out to study frogs in Costa Rica and inadvertently ended up documenting the “great frog die off,” the result of an amphibian chytrid fungus. The author then moves on to rusts, a group of pathogenic fungi similar to mushrooms that infect trees. Beginning in the early 1900s, a rust called chestnut blight obliterated between 3 billion and 4 billion American chestnuts in a few decades, pushing the species into functional extinction. One of the more distressing fungi is Pseudogymnoascus destructans, which has killed North American bats in droves; the author describes “caves that smelled like death” and “mice eating moribund bats that were too ill to fend them off.” Monosson is a skilled writer, capable of translating complicated scientific topics into compelling layperson’s terms, and she crafts a thrilling narrative around even the less charismatic victims of fungal pathogens (bananas, for example).
An engrossing read with an urgent message about the next frontier of disease.Pub Date: July 18, 2023
ISBN: 9781324007012
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2023
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.
A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.
In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536131
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
Are rivers alive? Macfarlane delivers a lucid, memorable argument in the affirmative.
The accomplished British nature writer turns to issues of environmental ethics in his latest exploration of the world.
In 1971, a law instructor asked a musing-out-loud question: Do trees have legal standing? His answer was widely mocked at the time, but it has gained in force: As Macfarlane chronicles here, Indigenous groups around the world are pressing “an idea that changes the world—the idea that a river is alive.” In the first major section of the book, Macfarlane travels to the Ecuadorian rainforest, where a river flows straight through a belt of gold and other mineral deposits that are, of course, much desired; his company on a long slog through the woods is a brilliant mycologist whose research projects have led not just to the discovery of a mushroom species that “would have first flourished on the supercontinent [of Gondwana] that formed over half a billion years ago,” but also to her proposing that fungi be considered a kingdom on a footing with flora and fauna. Other formidable activists figure in his next travels, to the great rivers of northern India, where, against the odds, some courts have lately been given to “shift Indian law away from anthropocentrism and towards something like ecological jurisprudence, underpinned by social justice.” The best part of the book, for those who enjoy outdoor thrills and spills, is Macfarlane’s third campaign, this one following a river in eastern Canada that, as has already happened to so many waterways there, is threatened to be impounded for hydroelectric power and other extractive uses. In delightfully eccentric company, and guided by the wisdom of an Indigenous woman who advises him to ask the river just one question, Macfarlane travels through territory so rugged that “even the trout have portage trails,” returning with hard-won wisdom about our evanescence and, one hopes, a river’s permanence and power to shape our lives for the better.
Are rivers alive? Macfarlane delivers a lucid, memorable argument in the affirmative.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780393242133
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: March 8, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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