An appealingly written, enlightening, and sometimes eerie journey into the extraordinary possibilities for the human senses.
An exploration of the ways the animal kingdom is providing insight into human senses.
What can we learn about ourselves by studying a vampire bat, a cheetah, or a moth? According to Higgins, who works for Oxford Scientific Films, quite a bit. In a series of essays, each focusing on an extraordinary sense of a specific animal, the author invites us to open up “to the everyday miracle of being sentient.” While we are taught that humans only have five senses, Higgins argues that we are capable of perceiving the world to a much greater degree than we may think. The limitations we put on ourselves become apparent as we study the ways in which animals use their senses. For example, the peacock mantis shrimp has spectacular eyesight largely due to additional photoreceptors that allow it to see colors that are invisible to the human eye. But as Higgins explains, many humans unknowingly possess a condition known as tetrachromacy, in which they have four cones (instead of three) and perceive the world in a wider range of colors, including a “rich and beautiful mosaic of lilacs, lavenders, violets, emeralds.” In a chapter on the great gray owl, the author suggests that anyone can learn a version of echolocation. When placed in a room similar to Beranek’s Box, the echo-free chamber created by acoustics scientist Leo Beranek during World War II, humans are able to hear blood rushing through their own veins. The reason is that our ears “become more sensitive as a place gets quieter.” In an authoritative and captivating tone, Higgins provides numerous entertaining lessons regarding how information gained from animals can be applied to humans. In fact, scientists are already utilizing this information to develop devices and enhancements to “cure” conditions such as blindness and deafness. Though full of arcane scientific information, the book is narrated in an easily readable tone, and Church’s well-rendered illustrations are a bonus.
An appealingly written, enlightening, and sometimes eerie journey into the extraordinary possibilities for the human senses.Pub Date: Feb. 22, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-982156-55-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Oct. 29, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2021
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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