This is part of my holy trinity now of nature writing. It is right up there with Baker's The Peregrine and Matthiessen's The Snow Leopard. Brilliant aThis is part of my holy trinity now of nature writing. It is right up there with Baker's The Peregrine and Matthiessen's The Snow Leopard. Brilliant an beautiful. I'm going to jump off because I'll just continue to mumble things like: scripture, masterpiece, and prose poetry, and y'all won't take me serious. ...more
I enjoyed it. Looking at the rise of Homo Sapiens and the decline and eventual extinction of Homo neanderthalensis through the prism ecology and theorI enjoyed it. Looking at the rise of Homo Sapiens and the decline and eventual extinction of Homo neanderthalensis through the prism ecology and theories of invasive theories. The subtitle of the book: "How Humans and Their Dogs Drove Neanderthals to Extinction" does seem to be a bit of a stretch. Her theory definitely suggests that early domesticated dogs/wolves might have aided Homo Sapien (Modern Man) in dominating the apex guild of carnivores in Europe.
The book is also a bit more broad, because dominating that position, man with pup's help might have also been part of the eventual extinction of other large carnivores (Cave Bear, etc) and large mammals (mammoths). The book, however, is a bit more nuanced, recognizing that climate change also probably had pushed neanderthalensis near extinction, and the introduction of man to Europe might have been the final spear in the side of the Neanderthal.
I enjoyed the book and it systematically covered a lot of territory and synthesized a lot of literature surrounding this period. The writing was ok, just didn't blow me away. So, I enjoyed it, but it didn't exactly blow me away. ...more
"And our children's vanishing encounters with nature represent a loss of primary experience." - Robert MacFarlane, Landmarks
"If children abandon 'the s"And our children's vanishing encounters with nature represent a loss of primary experience." - Robert MacFarlane, Landmarks
"If children abandon 'the sandlots and creek beds, the alleys and woodlands', if 'children are not permitted...to be adventurers and explorers as children', then 'what will become of the world of adventure, stories, of literature itself?'" - Michael Chabon, The Wilderness of Childhood
"I was reminded, too, of Emerson's beautiful description of language as 'a city to the building of which every person has brought a stone.'" - Emerson, quoted by Robert MacFarlane, Landmarks
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Inspired by the removal of several nature words in the Oxford Junior Dictionary: "acorn, adder, ash, beech, bluebell, buttercup..." The list was tragic. The thesis of Robert Macfarlane's book is we love the things we name, and if we lose the name for things in our language, our ability to care for nature and wilderness diminished. This book is a signpost pointing to books where the language of nature is strong. Chapters are essentially essays where Robert Macfarlane is able to sing a love letter to fantastic books like Nan Shepherd's In the Cairngorms, Roger Deakon's Waterlog: A Swimmer's Journey Through Britain, J.A. Baker's The Peregrine, Richard Skelton's Landings, Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams, Richard Jefferies' Nature Near London, Clarince Ellis's The Pebbles On The Beach, and John Muir's My First Summer in the Sierra.
Macfarlane's love for these books and topics is so rich it is hard to not love them back. I finished this book and purchased three more. It was infective. Just like the glossaries that divide the chapters. In the glossary, Macfarlane include nature words in danger of being lost. The words mostly are focused on Great Britain, but when this book was first published it inspired readers to send in their own local lexicons of nature. It really is beautifully constructed and for a book organic, which structurally is nearly perfect....more
"It is all heartbreak, at least if you've given over your heart." - Toni Jensen, Carry
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Certainly this is a memoir. Certainly it is a collection o"It is all heartbreak, at least if you've given over your heart." - Toni Jensen, Carry
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Certainly this is a memoir. Certainly it is a collection of essays. But Toni Jensen's book is way more complicated than that. Its prose beats with a poetic cadence. It is poetic both in its construction and its precision. Toni uses repetition to create almost a chant, a heartbeat, a lyrical prayer to tie the book's themes together. She is reporting on the familiar. That is the scary thing. We have, through lazy language and a shared dissimulation, ignored the violence that is our history and our present. We talk about it. But we also talk around it. We like to pretend this violence is exceptional. We like to feel like it is not the rule. Jensen shows us, however, through her experience and her refusal to buy into the familiar tropes, the signs that exist (both literal and figurative). We are a violent country. We have a gun problem.
One of the ways she ties this book's essays together is through her use of Webster's Dictionary. Her use of the dictionary does a couple things. First, through multiple definitions for a word, Toni is able to link the various themes in the book. She also uses the dictionary as a way to show that this is a memoir (of essays) as much about the language of violence as it is about those who are hurt by violence and those who do the hurting. We need to name things well. We need to be aware when the naming of things is being used to obfuscate, to misdirect, to disengage.
Finally, and more subtly, Toni is showing us how language is one of the ways we can protect ourselves. Words matter. Stories matter. Perspective matter. Giving voice to those who are hurt in our country matters. A dictionary isn't going to solve every problem, but it might just stop one bullet. Language might give one girl a refuge....more
“Rick’s dream, though he seldom described it as such, was to someday tell a story so good that the people who heard it simply wouldn’t want to kill wo“Rick’s dream, though he seldom described it as such, was to someday tell a story so good that the people who heard it simply wouldn’t want to kill wolves anymore.” - Nate Blakeslee, American Wolf
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This book is haunted by all the John McPhee I've read. I wanted to like it more. I love wolves, adore Yellowstone, and am even planning a trip this winter to try and spot some damn wolves (even if I have to wrap my ass in bacon and tie my sorry self to a tree). But back to the book. It just wasn't that well written. I mean it was good. It told the story of 06, , but with wolf books (and wolves almost have their own fiction and nonficiton genre) this one, while popular a couple years ago, just wasn't great. I mean, sure, the periods were probably all where they were supposed to be and all, but if the book appeared outside of Yellowstone, I'm pretty sure not even Steven Turnbull (a pseudonym) would shoot it.
But that leads me to wonder why the abundance of positive reviews:
1. I am wrong and the book was brilliant. 2. I am right, but people like wolves. So, even mediocre stories told of compeling wolves evoke posiitve responses. I'd equate this to watching a wolf out of a crappy spotting scope. Yes, a Swarovski® would have been much better, but YOU JUST SAW A F#&%ING WOLF, so who cares. 3. Other readers are just dumb.
I'm old and wise enough to believe it might be a bit of all three. Anyway, not great, not horrible, just a mediocre narrative nonficiton about Yellowstone and its wolves....more
“An organism that is too greedy and takes too much without giving anything in return destroys what it needs for life.” ― Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden L“An organism that is too greedy and takes too much without giving anything in return destroys what it needs for life.” ― Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees
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Peter Wohlleben has written a beautiful book on trees. He captures the imagination and translates his vision well. Like many science books for the masses he takes a good deal of information and distills it well for the amateur forester and part-time tree-hugger. The only reason I give this book four stars and not five is because his biggest strength is also, perhaps, his biggest (or most important) weakness.
I worry about the anthropomorphizing of animals, fungus, or plant. It is a strength because it creates empathy. It works. I read that a tree might feel pain, communicates, nutures its young, takes care of the sick, works together, counts, etc., and I am (hopefully, if I have any empathy in me) feel a bit more hesitant to abuse or misuse trees.
BUT, my concern with this type of treatment is two fold: 1) trees aren't human. By focusing on the parts of trees (or forests) that appear to have human traits, we are putting ourselves at the center. We are creating (or strengthening the notion rather) that WE are the freaking center of the living universe. Those trees they are important because they LOOK/ACT like us. It is a slippery slope. Do the benefits outweigh the costs in the short or long term? I don't know. I just know there is a danger here. 2) perhaps, by giving these behaviors (communication, counting, etc) words that have a very significant meaning for man, we are actually NOT communicating what they are doing that is unique. Maybe communication or counting or nurturing ISN'T what they are doing and these human behavior metaphors are not allowing these amazing trees to be viewed as amazing AND alien enough. This isn't the same, but it for me is similar to comparing fungi to plants. Yes, there might be similarities, but these are two completely separate kingdoms. Sometimes, we can mix them together (in a salad perhaps), but some metaphors don't do justice to just how funky and beautiful and DIFFERENT these kingdoms really are. Perhaps, by making trees seem more human we are doing a long-term disservice by NOT making them seem alien enough.
And, perhap, I'm just wrong. I'm willing to accept that too.
Oh, and this is just Part I of Wohlleben's 'The Mysteries of Nature trilogy'. The follow-up books are:
"Look at the brightside always and die in a dream!" - Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Anima Poetae, 1804
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I'm not sure what the 1/2 life of getting over "Look at the brightside always and die in a dream!" - Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Anima Poetae, 1804
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I'm not sure what the 1/2 life of getting over this book is, but like all of Vollmann's nonfiction, it spins a massive data/narrative web that grows, and grows, and sticks. I absolutely agree with some of the previous reviews that some of Vollmann's data in this book might be flawed, but THAT is part of the point of this book. There is SO much data, so many ways to view risk, and it is so diffuse that making policy decisions or changing behaviors becomes difficult (I actually think that is one of Vollmann's major points).
Vol 1: No Immediate Danger (the first half of Carbon Ideologies) is basically broken into three major commonents:
1. Into and The Primer (1 - 220) 2. Nuclear Ideology (221 - 516) 3. Definitions, Units, Conversions, Tables (517 - 600)
No Good Alternative: Volume Two of Carbon Ideologies: 2 will focus more on carbon (read coal, natural gas, oil). It will not have the Prime (the carbon pump only needs primed once) or the definitions, units, conversions.
"All three volumes use induction to generalize from subjective case studies into analytical categories of the phenomenon under investigation."
I'm not done with Rising Up and Rising Down. Carbon Ideologies is a Vollmann diversion.*
Reviewing this book is a challenge for several reasons. I'm not going to review the facts (because, like we've seen with politics and ideologies, the facts soon stop mattering). Also, I'm more interested in writing about Vollmann's larger approach.
I'm going to (tomorrow, always tomorrow) review first The Primer - Not finished. Not harldy begun, but perhaps, I'll just say this. I think we as humans (and Vollmann shows this over and over again) lie to survive. We lie with data. We lie to each other. We lie to ourselves. We ignore facts. Think of mob wives who are blind to the actions of their mobster husbands. We are all mob wives. We ignore the cost to the future because we are satisfied with our excesses of today. We also lie, not just because we don't want to be confronted with the things that make our life easier, we also lie to survive. Less mobster wife, and more abused wife. If we were confronted by the truth, every day, of how exactly we were f-ing the future with our energy use, our plastic use, our farming, our consumerism, we might not mentally make it. So, we get lost in the data or chose to ignore it. We let those profiting from it bullshit us, again and again. Because to pay attention is to be robbed of the mental fat that we all need to sometimes not go mad. I think it was PKD who said, "It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.". I would adjust that. We avoid going insane in the modern world by going blind.
After that, I'm most certainly next going to review Nuclear Ideology - Begun, but not by much.
So, I won't forget, one of the things I want to include are several examples from this book where Vollmann's prose (especially when he is describing the landscape around Fukushima, or the dialogues of those escorting him around the Red Zones and Yellow Zones) rings like Japanese poetry. Several lines feel like they could have been written by Bashō (松尾 芭蕉).
* It is hard with Vollmann's intensity to do anything quite straight....more
"It may be in the margins of our gardens that we can discover fresh ways to bring our aesthetics and our ethics about the land into some meaningful al"It may be in the margins of our gardens that we can discover fresh ways to bring our aesthetics and our ethics about the land into some meaningful alignment." -- Michael Pollan, Second Nature
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I'm pretty sure I'm now a Michael Pollan completist. This was Pollan's first, and as I typically read the first last, my usual brush with Pollan completism for now.
This book sent me back to days working in my grandmother's garden, my mother's garden, my wife and my first garden on our apartment balcony. It reminded me of wandering through Jefferson's garden at Monticello, Versailles, and the lilac gardens of Maui. Pollan was definitly influenced in his writing by Thoreau and Wendell Berry, but Pollan's philosophy in this book seems driven more by the pragmatism of William James. His basic premise is that the garden is the better metaphor for dealing with the current environmental issues confronting us; and the zero-sum-game debates surrounding development vs wilderness. I generally agree with a lot of what he says about gardens, trees, wilderness, and our need to find new metaphors for our relationship with nature that weaves together nature and man and man's culture together. He does tend to wax poetic. Pollan is basically a long-form magazine writter who, like John McPhee and others, figured out that narrative nonfiction can work in chapters made from magazine articles and confederate them together into a book. Not the best Pollan, but for Pollan fans, nature lovers, or gardeners, there is definitely enough grown in this book to feed all types....more
“Time is the essential ingredient, but in the modern world there is no time.” - Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction
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Probably a more important“Time is the essential ingredient, but in the modern world there is no time.” - Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction
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Probably a more important book than a great book. It seemed to capture some much needed attention to the state of the living world and the impact MAN is having on his environment. Spoiler Alert: Man is the 6th Extinction. We are metaphorical (well, not really metaphorical) asteroid about to undo what it took the Earth millions of years to produce. And, we've been doing it almost since we've shown up.
In someways it reads like a horror novel. You KNOW how it is going to end. You know the damn clown is going to jump out of THAT room, and yet it still scares the bejesus out of you. When I read this book, I think of a couple books. First, it is kinda like The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate – Discoveries from a Secret World in that it is a very empathetic approach to its subject matter.
It also reminds me a bit of Richard Preston's The Hot Zone: The Terrifying True Story of the Origins of the Ebola Virus in that it uses science to scare the shit out of the reader. But instead of detailing a superbug from Africa that might get us, it is US that will eventually get us (after we have destroyed the limb we've been standing on). Another parallel to Preston's Hot Zone is also the cultural impact the book made. I remember in 1994 when the Hot Zone came out, it was maybe not a cultural moment, but it made a big enough impression that movies were made. The Sixth Extinction, 20-years-later, in 2014 produced a similar cultural impact.
Finally, it also reminded me a bit of John McPhee. Kolbert writes in a style similar to McPhee's just not at his level. And this is the main reason I gave it only 4-stars. McPhee could take a subject (geology, bark canoes, Alaska, etc.) and with history, science, and a relevant personality, tease out a sweet literary line. Kolbert does a good job, it just doesn't ring or flow in the same way. To be fair, I'm comparing a very good science writer with perhaps the greatest new journalist ever. So, there is that....more
"In the streets of UnLondon, a group of a girl, a half-ghost, a talking book, a piece of rubbish, and two living words was unusual, but not very." -- C"In the streets of UnLondon, a group of a girl, a half-ghost, a talking book, a piece of rubbish, and two living words was unusual, but not very." -- China Miéville, Un Lun Dun
I kinda gave this a pass because it was written for teens and it felt like an early jaunt in world building that was entertaining, but not perfect. Miéville's novels that followed (The City & The City, Kraken, Embassytown, got significantly better. Anyway, one of my least favorite CM novels thus far. But when he strikes out it is only because he tends to swing hard and risk it all, everytime....more
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