An incisive, information-packed update on man and nature in our greatest rainforest.
An overview of the vast and much-transformed region where more than 20 million people now live: an opportunity-filled frontier akin to the American West.
Twenty-five years after their first extensive visits (chronicled in Amazon, 1983), the authors returned to find that the once-“untouchable” area, which contains half of Earth’s remaining forest, is changing rapidly. In the early 1980s, three percent of the Amazon’s 2.5 million square miles of forest had been destroyed to make way for logging, farming and cattle ranching. Today, 20 percent of the land is deforested, despite efforts by environmentalists to save its unparalleled biological riches. London, an attorney, and Kelly, executive editor of U.S. News & World Report, draw on months of travel, interviews and other research, including recent scholarly findings showing that humans lived in the Amazon 10,000 years ago, apparently in harmony with the environment. With its endless supply of heat, sun, rainfall and usable land, the Amazon has attracted more and more pioneers (including many young professionals) since the founding of Brasilia in 1960, they write. And access to information and technology is spurring still more development: At Grupo Maggi, a huge agribusiness, employees communicate by cellphone and Internet with port managers, barge captains, Chicago grain dealers and shipping companies in Rotterdam and Shanghai. Like it or not, “the Amazon is occupied and will remain so.” The book brims with anecdotes about efforts to exploit the environment, from gold-mining and illegal logging of mahogany (“green gold”) to the efforts of responsible farmers like Jaime Luiz Demarchi, who, rather than pursue slash-and-burn agriculture, has spent years mastering the soil and crop rotation needed to make a success of three farms. The authors note that the TransPacific Highway and other new roads will bring still more change, since most deforestation occurs near roads. Any effort to “save” the species-rich Amazon, they conclude, must now take into account human populations.
An incisive, information-packed update on man and nature in our greatest rainforest.Pub Date: Feb. 13, 2007
ISBN: 0-679-64305-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Unsentimental nature writing that sheds as much light on humans as on eels.
An account of the mysterious life of eels that also serves as a meditation on consciousness, faith, time, light and darkness, and life and death.
In addition to an intriguing natural history, Swedish journalist Svensson includes a highly personal account of his relationship with his father. The author alternates eel-focused chapters with those about his father, a man obsessed with fishing for this elusive creature. “I can’t recall us ever talking about anything other than eels and how to best catch them, down there by the stream,” he writes. “I can’t remember us speaking at all….Because we were in…a place whose nature was best enjoyed in silence.” Throughout, Svensson, whose beat is not biology but art and culture, fills his account with people: Aristotle, who thought eels emerged live from mud, “like a slithering, enigmatic miracle”; Freud, who as a teenage biologist spent months in Trieste, Italy, peering through a microscope searching vainly for eel testes; Johannes Schmidt, who for two decades tracked thousands of eels, looking for their breeding grounds. After recounting the details of the eel life cycle, the author turns to the eel in literature—e.g., in the Bible, Rachel Carson’s Under the Sea Wind, and Günter Grass’ The Tin Drum—and history. He notes that the Puritans would likely not have survived without eels, and he explores Sweden’s “eel coast” (what it once was and how it has changed), how eel fishing became embroiled in the Northern Irish conflict, and the importance of eel fishing to the Basque separatist movement. The apparent return to life of a dead eel leads Svensson to a consideration of faith and the inherent message of miracles. He warns that if we are to save this fascinating creature from extinction, we must continue to study it. His book is a highly readable place to begin learning.
Unsentimental nature writing that sheds as much light on humans as on eels.Pub Date: May 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-296881-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 29, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
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