A clarion call for preservation by way of a delightful bestiary.
Literature, folklore, history, and science inform these profiles of 22 endangered species.
The award-winning author of young adult books and a superb biography of John Donne turns her sharp literary style and wit to endangered animals in this brisk, eye-opening, thoroughly entertaining book. Animals who exhibit “everlasting flight, a self-galvanizing heart and a baby who learns names in the womb” may seem like inventions, she writes, but the natural world is "so startling that our capacity for wonder, huge as it is, can barely skim the surface." Meet the speedy swift, the American wood frog, and the dolphin. Early on, Rundell reminds us that we’ve lost “more than half of all wild things that lived.” The quick Australian wombat, one of poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s favorite pets, is “one of the rarest land mammals in the world.” It’s possible that some rarely seen, slow, half-blind Greenland sharks are more than 500 years old. She’s furious that America has refused to designate the giraffe as an endangered species, even though its numbers have dropped 40% in 30 years. She relishes the strength of the coconut hermit crab, named after the hard-shelled fruit it can crack open, whose intricate group interactions "make the politics of Renaissance courts look simplistic.” Of the eight species of bear, six are at risk or endangered, and "the number of hares in Britain has declined by 80 percent in the last century." Storks, conversely, are a “true success story of back-from-the-brink.” Other animals she regards with reverence and concern for their future are seahorses (the majority of their species could be gone by 2050), pangolins (“the world’s only rainbow mammal...currently the most trafficked animals in the world”), and the blind, iridescent golden mole, which can hear ants and beetles crawling aboveground. Young and old will savor Rundell’s infectious enthusiasm for these remarkable and infinitely varied creatures.
A clarion call for preservation by way of a delightful bestiary.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2024
ISBN: 9780385550826
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
SEEN & HEARD
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
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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