“It took me years to stop smoking,” says Hunter. “It will take a while to learn to stop climate-wrecking.” Though he...
A credible warning of imminent ecological catastrophe, a nightmare brought about by greed, lies, denial, and inertia—to say nothing of SUVs.
You can be forgiven for assuming, thanks to the title, that this is some kind of bottom-of-the-barrel L. Ron Hubbard offering. But don’t be put off. Hunter, a cofounder of Greenpeace (Warriors of the Rainbow, not reviewed), does bring plenty of doom-and-gloom rhetoric and nightmare scenarios into play, but he also offers a healthy dose of good science in support of his overarching message, which can be condensed along these lines: Change your ways, postindustrialists, or come a quarter-century from now, the world is going to change in ways that will make life very difficult, if not impossible, for humans and other living things. Such messages are nothing new; as Hunter acknowledges, scientists have warned of global warming since at least 1957, when oceanographers observed that the world’s seas were absorbing less and less carbon dioxide and began to wonder where all that extra CO2 was going. What has changed, though, is an apparent unwillingness on the part of the general culture, and certainly the media, to treat such phenomena as a problem worth getting worked up about; “despite the existence of an instantaneous global communications system,” Hunter observes, the First World takes a business-as-usual attitude toward the environment, even as new “vehicles with internal-combustion engines are coming off the assembly lines around the world at the rate of one per minute” and the footprint of Americans and Europeans on the environment grows heavier and heavier, a pattern that will only increase as more and more nations become developed. What to do? Well, says Hunter, a little monkeywrenching might be in order—but so, too, is activism to press the cause of alternative energy and the like, and take note: a reordering of priorities to lessen individual consumption of resources.
“It took me years to stop smoking,” says Hunter. “It will take a while to learn to stop climate-wrecking.” Though he probably won’t reach the worst offenders, the author makes a good case for going cold turkey on Humvees, heated pools, and other deadly luxuries.Pub Date: April 22, 2003
ISBN: 1-55970-667-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2003
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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