A heartfelt, lovely, and thoroughly lived-through meditation on the natural world and its central part in any civilized life.
It is not enough that we rush to stanch the wounds our kind has inflicted on the world, writes British environmental journalist McCarthy (Say Goodbye to the Cuckoo: Migratory Birds and the Impending Ecological Catastrophe, 2010, etc.). More than that, “we should offer up its joy.”
Part of this book is a memoir of a life spent seeking nature in a time when nature is on the run, particularly on the too-populous, too–automobile overrun island of Britain. “It is only through specific personal experience,” writes the author, “that the case can be made, which is why I will offer mine.” Some of those experiences are luminous, as with a long-ago flurry of moths that yields his title and a sort of cri de guerre for his life as a champion of wild things. Part of his book, too, is a carefully elaborated meditation on what has happened to a world in which suburban gardens and rural woodlots are carpeted over with asphalt. What happens to people who live in such environs and to children whose worlds are constricted to the driveway and perhaps the driveway next door? McCarthy brings his experience as an activist and advocate to bear; writing of an effort to reintroduce the salmon to the Thames River, he admits the possibility that the world may be too far gone for our weak efforts at making up: “The principal lesson of the Thames salmon story, for me, is that we can sometimes damage the natural world too severely for it to be repaired.” That glumness is not the usual stuff of nature writing, which tends to be more celebratory, but McCarthy’s view is cleareyed, and this book extends a newly revived British literary naturalist tradition lately spearheaded by the likes of Robert Macfarlane, Roger Deakin, Adam Nicolson, and other wanderers along the hedgerows.
A heartfelt, lovely, and thoroughly lived-through meditation on the natural world and its central part in any civilized life.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-68137-040-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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