Reviews
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The Big Book of Eagles
But let’s start… small: the Pygmy Eagle weights about the same as a pigeon. Whaa-ut? Hieraaetus weiskei is found on New Guinea and some of the surrounding islands. Evolutionary pressures on islands can sometimes result in rather small animals. Interestingly, this species is said to be one of the closest living relatives of the largest…
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A Philosophical Botany
In Plants as Persons: A Philosophical Botany Matthew Hall’s argument doesn’t strike me as provocative, but for others grounded in anthropocentrism, zoocentrism, Cartesian dualities, and very out-of-date biological understanding, it may. “Plants and humans share a basic, ontological reality as perceptive, aware, autonomous, self-governed, and intelligent beings,” he writes. As fellow eukaryotes, plants and animals…
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On Heredity
Carl Zimmer’s She Has Her Mother’s Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity is an essential read in our present moment. Genetic essentialism and ignorance; fundamentalism and fascism; the revival of eugenic racist thought and strategy by the Republicans; all these combine in the vital necessity of a history and understanding of biological and…
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Leviathan?
“What is to be done?” asked Nikolay Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky in the title of his 1863 novel about the situation of Russian. Chernyshevsky wrote, from prison, something of a “handbook of radicalism,” postulating a sort of utopian peasant/commune/industrial socialism. Perhaps, though, the most important thing about the book was the burning titular question, which fired debate…
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The Art of Naming
Last week we muddied the tree of life. This week, the long human attempt to straighten it all out by giving all the pieces names. In The Art of Naming, Michael Ohl explores the history and principles of taxonomic naming. Esoteric? I don’t think so. He dabbles a little in common names, those vernacular names…
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The Tangled Tree
Add some DNA from viruses, bacteria, chimpanzees, and, for some of us, Neanderthals, and pretty soon— well, ok, after a couple billion years — you have human beings. Let’s stress that plural for a second: we really are beings, our bodies covered inside and out with microbes. Some studies say we’re one-to-one bacterial to human…
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Bats, Vultures, & Two-Legged Ghouls
Pity uncharismatic wildlife! So much easier to slaughter. We have here two books on creatures that get the short end of the representational stick most places around the world, meaning the stick is often applied to them. Bats are irrationally feared. They’re also pollinators (of wild bananas, agave, and much else), voracious insect devourers, and…
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The Overstory
“What use are we, to trees?” Richard Powers’s novel begins with Roots, separate stories, capsule biographies. These are illustrated at chapter start with leaves of the trees prominent in each story. In one case the tree isn’t named, since the character is oblivious to this tree, but the description is more than suggestive and the unique…
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Willughby
The very next book I picked up after No Way But Gentlenesse was Tim Birkhead’s The Wonderful Mr Willughby: The First True Ornithologist. And the very first section break, after a discussion of Honey Buzzards, which Francis Willughby distinguished from Common Buzzard at the dawn of taxonomy, is this dingbat of three soaring raptors. A…
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K is for Kestrel
Richard Hines’s No Way But Gentlenesse is a memoir of the stunting British class system, and his falcons. The first theme definitely grips one’s attention, the second, well, less so for this ornithologically-inclined kestrel-fancier. Hines’s older brother Barry wrote a novel called A Kestrel For a Knave (1968), inspired by Richard’s experience with Falco tinnunculus.…
Backyard and Beyond 