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queenluaFirst off: the production values of the dead-tree version are fantastic. The cover is so glittery! The illustrations are so pretty! The paper feels so nice!
As to the contents: this book is both an account of the life of David Starr Jordan, an obsessive late-1800s early-1900s ichthyologist, and an account of the author's own experiences with loss and depression-of-the-existentially-paralytic-variety, woven together.
This format can work really well: I adored H is for Hawk, which was basically "author grieves father's death via (1) doing falconry and (2) obsessing over T.H. White." However, in this book, I found the connections that Miller drew to be a little strained and... twee, honestly... which feels like a weird thing to say, given how heavy some of the covered topics are! But like, if you start your book out with "the second rule of thermodynamics means Chaos Rules Everything Around Me and [insert long, poetic, but kinda-strained connection to larger despairs here]," like... yeah, I'm cold-hearted and judgy, and thus the narrative starts out with negative points in my book, lol.
That being said! The book is a perfectly competent tale of Some Eccentric 1800s Dude, and thus is littered with delightful eccentric period details. (A few off the top of my head: when Jordan becomes the founding president of Stanford, he lines up a veritable menagerie, including two parrots—one which speaks Latin, the other Spanish—the former implying that someone had to SPECIFICALLY TEACH that parrot Latin, because there's no way you just overhear a dead language, and that's delightful omg. Also, apparently while at Stanford, he got into a ton of fights with one of the founders, Jane Stanford, because she was really desperate to contact her dead son and going to mystics and séance people all the time, and also science had just started discovering all this cool electromagnetism and radiation stuff, which she decided clearly must be messages from the other side! and she begged Jordan to please start a Department Of Studying Woo Shit In Modern Physics!!! California: Weird About This Sort Of Thing Since 1891. Jordan's response was a whole bunch of proto-proto-proto-New-Atheist ~spicy~ essays, heh.)
And, if you think the front half of the book is solid, the second half is even stronger. The tl;dr is that the author learns Her Fave Is Indeed Problematic, i.e. an early and enthusiastic and powerful campaigner for eugenics, and she uses that as an opportunity to really dig into that ugly history, go hear the stories of those directly affected, and properly wrestle with what that means. And in that process, there's a lot of bleak shit (unfun fact: did you know one-third of Puerto Rican women were sterilized between 1933 and 1968?), but the connections she makes, and the people she meets, by going out and confronting all that is—it's good shit, in a way that's hard to describe without context, but yeah, it's good.
So, while I wasn't as effusively pleased with the book as the reviewer who compelled me to pick it up, it did have lots of interesting bits despite the twee-ness, and since it's such a short and breezy read I'm quite satisfied with what it is.
As to the contents: this book is both an account of the life of David Starr Jordan, an obsessive late-1800s early-1900s ichthyologist, and an account of the author's own experiences with loss and depression-of-the-existentially-paralytic-variety, woven together.
This format can work really well: I adored H is for Hawk, which was basically "author grieves father's death via (1) doing falconry and (2) obsessing over T.H. White." However, in this book, I found the connections that Miller drew to be a little strained and... twee, honestly... which feels like a weird thing to say, given how heavy some of the covered topics are! But like, if you start your book out with "the second rule of thermodynamics means Chaos Rules Everything Around Me and [insert long, poetic, but kinda-strained connection to larger despairs here]," like... yeah, I'm cold-hearted and judgy, and thus the narrative starts out with negative points in my book, lol.
That being said! The book is a perfectly competent tale of Some Eccentric 1800s Dude, and thus is littered with delightful eccentric period details. (A few off the top of my head: when Jordan becomes the founding president of Stanford, he lines up a veritable menagerie, including two parrots—one which speaks Latin, the other Spanish—the former implying that someone had to SPECIFICALLY TEACH that parrot Latin, because there's no way you just overhear a dead language, and that's delightful omg. Also, apparently while at Stanford, he got into a ton of fights with one of the founders, Jane Stanford, because she was really desperate to contact her dead son and going to mystics and séance people all the time, and also science had just started discovering all this cool electromagnetism and radiation stuff, which she decided clearly must be messages from the other side! and she begged Jordan to please start a Department Of Studying Woo Shit In Modern Physics!!! California: Weird About This Sort Of Thing Since 1891. Jordan's response was a whole bunch of proto-proto-proto-New-Atheist ~spicy~ essays, heh.)
And, if you think the front half of the book is solid, the second half is even stronger. The tl;dr is that the author learns Her Fave Is Indeed Problematic, i.e. an early and enthusiastic and powerful campaigner for eugenics, and she uses that as an opportunity to really dig into that ugly history, go hear the stories of those directly affected, and properly wrestle with what that means. And in that process, there's a lot of bleak shit (unfun fact: did you know one-third of Puerto Rican women were sterilized between 1933 and 1968?), but the connections she makes, and the people she meets, by going out and confronting all that is—it's good shit, in a way that's hard to describe without context, but yeah, it's good.
So, while I wasn't as effusively pleased with the book as the reviewer who compelled me to pick it up, it did have lots of interesting bits despite the twee-ness, and since it's such a short and breezy read I'm quite satisfied with what it is.
no subject
Date: 2021-08-07 12:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-08-08 09:01 am (UTC)it's true!!! super weird but i guess writing in general is weird so
*H is for Hawk proselytization intensifies* :P