Where the Wild things are

Search for the Golden Moon Bear: Science and Adventure in Search of a New Species - Sy Montgomery

Monster of God: The Man-Eating Predator in the Jungles of History and the Mind - David Quammen

Spell of the Tiger: Man-Eaters of the Sundarbans - Sy Montgomery

Yummy Wishlist

Reading memoirs and chronicles that center around food is something I love, but haven't really done lately. Last books I read on the subject were "Climbing the Mango Tree" by Madhur Jaffrey and Elizabeth David's "My Life in France". I much preferred the first - I like my books, if not my food, on the exotic side.

Then I read the second part of Ruth Reichl's autobiography: "Comfort me with apples" which honestly wasn't that good, especially compared with her first "Tender at the Bone", and sort of let the food thing slide for a while.

But no more! I found these three books which I feel certain will provide hours of food craving:

Staling Buddha's Dinner: A Memoir - Bich Minh Nguyen



Bento Box in the Heartland - My Japanese Girlhood in Whitebread America - Linda Furiya



Serve the People: A Stir-fried Journey through China - Jen Lin-Liu




Although, in the spirit of thrift I should probably get to these two - which I got on may last food book binge and still haven't read:

The Passionate Epicure - Marcel Rouff



Endless Feasts: sixty years of writing from Gourmet

My absolute favourites in this collection, you ask? Why, here they are:

Clémentine in the Kitchen - Samuel Chamberlain



Katish - Our Russian Cook - Wanda Frolov

All Things Reconsidered - Roger Tory Peterson

All Things Reconsidered - my birding adventures

I had some trouble getting into this book. I guess one reason is, while I love birds very much, I’m not (yet, maybe) a bird-watcher, so many bird names in the book, especially the first pieces didn’t really mean much to me.

I also didn’t know much about Roger Tory Peterson except for a couple of articles I read on New York Review of Books (one, a review of this book). I knew only that he was considered peerless in his artistic portrayals of birds and that his bird identification guide (published in 1934) revolutionized the field-practice. So with that in mind I think I bypassed the two large groups of people this book is aimed at.

These are a series of articles publishes in the magazine Bird Watcher's Digest from ‘84 to ’96 (the year of his death at 88) ranging a breath of subjects: many are reminiscences of the author’s first steps into bird-watching (among my favorites), exotic expeditions, smaller adventures near-home (some of these were also beautiful), eulogies of colleagues, reflections on conservation and wild-life art.

His style is very polite, very soothing even gentlemanly. Reading “All Things Reconsidered” I really got a sense of how important Peterson was in the bird-watching and conservation world in the U.S. He was one of the first to witness the damage DDT spraying was causing among birds, and to demand its eradication; he also was the driving force behind many sanctuaries both in the U.S. and outside, not to mention his activities within the Audubon Society, his work with young people and teachers, some of the first bird-watching expeditions aimed at tourist, and of course, his guides, who found a way into every bird-watchers pocket everywhere around the world.

Orchid Fever - Eric Hansen

Orchids seem to bring out the wackiness within. Who knew? Not me. I thought they were pretty plants who usually die despite my best efforts, or whose flowers smell like carrion like a specimen I was once presented with (thanks.).

Turns out there’s a whole orchid “sub-culture” out there – where nurseries are patrolled by armed security and people get into fist-fights over bulbs. (Two things that are usually found in close proximity to orchids I found, both through reading “Orchid Fever” and a spot of internet research are guns and reptiles. Go figure.)

Now, I had already read “Tulipmania” which is often mentioned in reviews of Hansen’s book, but let me tell you those sixteenth-century tulip lovers didn’t have anything on these guys and gals.

However, Hansen delivers a double-whammy with “Orchid Fever”: it’s not just about the orchids and human eccentricity, the things we hold as valuable and what we’ll do to get them; Hansen also constructs here a very powerful condemnation of CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species) policies which, in the best case scenario, are not doing much to protect endangered species, and in the worst case, are building a corrupt network of officials, lead by ignorant lawyers who as one character puts it “don’t know a blade of grass from an orchid” – with this ignorance extending to many other species, both animal and plant, one imagines.(And to think orchids are actually their logo. Crazy.)

It’s not the first criticism of CITES I’ve read, but certainly the most powerful because Hansen merely needs to tell his subject’s encounters with Convention officials for it to become apparent that this organization is a nest of rabid bureaucrats with little idea of what’s going on with the species they are ‘protecting’. Certainly CITES is only concerned with ‘trade’ which means that, if you witness deforestation in Borneo, for instance, and grab a couple of plants listed on Appendix I to save and/or try to take them across borders – you are getting fined, big time and maybe even arrested. Meanwhile does anyone care about the fate of the animals and plants, losing their habitats? Not CITES. They’ve got their officials making the rounds at every major airport/port. If that’s supposed to keep species from going extinct, God help us all.

“Orchid Fever” is a great book, filled with impossible characters (seriously, if you read about these people in a work of fiction, you’d be like ‘That’s soo far-fetched). It made my eyes pop in astonishment but it also got me angry. So c’mon people, who’s gonna write me a CITES exposé? I’ll be first in line to buy that sucker.

Amazonian Expeditions OR Why I could never be a biologist

Journey of the Pink Dolphins - Sy Montgomery
A Parrot without a Name - Don Stap

At one point in Sy Montgomery’s expedition in the Amazon it seems as if every other hut on the river is inhabited by a grad student. Scary. Some tag turtles, some count fish, some get bored out of their mind and others get sick (has a ring to it, doesn’t it?).

Montgomery’s journey to find the Amazonian pink dolphins was not ‘scientific’ but rather a voyage lead by the imagination and emotion. That’s what makes her book so appealing even though, the pink dolphin itself, is so often elusive. After all, as the author says in the book (in a passage, I can’t for the life of me find right now): “to follow” doesn’t only mean to pursue in a linear fashion; it also means “to be guided by”, “to grasp the meaning”, “to engage”, “to take as model”. Her pursuit of these primitive dolphins is more telepathic and poetic. When the author borrows radio antennae to track dolphins that have been tagged, she comes up with nothing. Almost as if the animals were trying to tell her “that’s not the way to get in touch with us”. Yet her dreams are filled with dolphins. When she finally gets a chance to swim with them – to engage them on their own terms, on their own realm, that’s when a real interspecies conversation takes place. This is a beautiful book for all who dream of following their own familiar – a journey mapped by little else than a humble intuition of an ancient bond.

“A Parrot without a Name” also speaks of something ancient: human obsession with naming, cataloguing and “understanding”. That which is unnamed is nonexistent. Surely some Greek philosopher said something along those lines. Just as the verb “to follow” has many meanings so too does “to understand”. In a biology dictionary, though, I’m afraid it mostly means “to take apart in order to catalogue and name” rather than the actual meaning of “to have sympathy or tolerance”.

For those of us ignorant of what goes on in an actual ornithological expedition (to Peru near the Brazilian border) these days, this will be something of a shocker. Yup, they kill birds. Loads of birds. Scientists will set up mist nets (the kind I grew up watching in nature documentaries as being the fare of evil bird smugglers) to catch birds, including many that may not be of interest in that particular case. If they are of interest, the scientist will perform a maneuver called “squeezing” where force is applied by the fingers to the bird’s thorax until he stops breathing. If the specimen is large a pentobarbital shot is given. They also shoot them right from the trees. Since the obvious purpose is to conserve plumage and shape (although sometimes also internal organs), ornithologists will have to kill numerous birds, since some are damaged by the bird shot.

Author Don Stap makes a proficient enunciation of all the reasons killing birds is important to science. Guess what? I didn’t think even one was reasonable. And the way he felt compelled to go through them, tells me he probably wasn’t either. Anyways, the holy grail of ornithologists today is to discover a new species (yup, that’ll really make you a superstar, apparently). But to get your discovery approved by the scientific establishment (who resemble Kang & Kodos, or so I’m told) you Must Bring Proof. Dead Proof. Many Dead.

Stap followed an expedition in 1985 that hit the mother load: on his last day on camp, someone shot a couple of small green birds, that didn’t exactly fit any of the described species of the area. They ended up shooting 18 birds. In 1991 the Amazonian Parrotlet (Nannopsittaca dachilleae) finally became a recognized species. It’s such a rare species that for awhile it was believed they had gone extinct. But what the hell – there are 18 specimens stacked up in a university somewhere.
We can all breathe a sigh of relief. Where would we be without Science after all?

My advice? Take a picture. Seeing as museum specimens are taken care of, it will definitely last longer.

Brushing up on French and Italian

Andrea Camilleri
La vampa d'agosto (10 in the series)
Le alli della sfinge (11)

Montalbano - may I call you papà?

Of Comissario Montalbano, what can I say? This is comfort reading at its very best. It's murder mystery at its best and it stacks up my Italian vocab with loads of Sicilian expressions I hope I will someday have cause to use.
That chicks dig Montalbano is a given. The why is harder to ascertain - is it a boyfriend thing or a father figure thing? It might be that he's so darn smart and broody, and loyal (in a cheating kind of way). By the way, in my mind he looks NOTHING like Luca Zingaretti, the actor that portrays him in the RAI tv series.

Isabelle Eberhardt
Amours Nomades

Sometimes a female icon is just a boring broad in drag

Since she is such an icon (I didn't know of her before I got the book, though) I best tread lightly here. But this was sort of, a big disappointment.
Since Eberhardt, born in 1877 of an illegitimate relation between her Russian mother and Armenian tutor, lived a short and tragic life, converted to Islam and travelled extensively in Algeria and Tunisia, she seemed to me a sort of proto-Schwarzenbach.
Well, on page she's not. "Amours Nomades" is a series of short stories on love-gone-wrong among the natives of North Africa. Most times someone will die of consumption or take their own lives during a heat wave or a magical sunset. It gets repetitive pretty soon. And even though it sounds awful to say this, it was all a bit Harlequin-esque.
There is none of Schwarzenbach's restraint, her steely gaze sadness, her observation skills. Eberhardt's North Africa smacks of theme-park quaintness. There, I said it. I feel awful, but the book was terrible.

Flamingos and Rhinos

The Boilerplate Rhino: Nature in the eye of the beholder - David Quammen
Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in modern America – Jennifer Price

I loved “The Song of the Dodo”. It’s one of my all-time favorite books. But the short article form doesn’t really give David Quammen the space to spread his wings. An author that jumps as deftly as he does through time, space and scientific and natural history writing a magazine column is like a macaw shut in a budgie cage: he sticks out all over the place.

“The Boilerplate Rhino” is a collection of articles written for the magazine Outside. In a lot of articles you can hear Quammen rant against deadlines, lack of inspiration and lack of space. The extreme sports/ hiking crowd that read the magazine are not necessarily Nature lovers as the author is painfully aware. Just because you want to climb, raft or cycle doesn’t exactly mean you listen to it – or its stories.

Quammen takes pleasure in finding new viewpoints for the reader – my favorite is: we have “cans of a product called dolphin-safe tuna. But no tuna-safe dolphin.”. I liked his ramble in T-Rex country (“Local bird makes good”) and loved his take on the American lawn (“Rethinking the lawn”, a subject Price also explores). In fact essays where Quammen haunts his home state of Montana, where he allows the reader to catch a glimpse of his home, where my favorite. But I was also moved by the amazing and sad stories he tells in “Palpating the tumor” (where a daughter struggles to share her mother with cancer) and “Half-blinded poets and birds” on the death of Robert Penn Warren.

For fans of the author’s writing this is, of course, a must. But be warned: it doesn’t quite sate the hunger.

“Flight Maps” is a very original book that takes a look at how Americans relate to nature. Sometimes that relationship doesn’t involve actual Nature. It might take the form of a plastic pink flamingo, a British lawn transplanted to arid soils, a shopping spree at a shop that features “nature” in its name, or a tv show like “Northern Exposure”. The more contemporary essays: (“Looking for Nature at the Mall: a field guide to the Nature Company”, “Roadrunners Can’t Read: the greening of television in the 1990s” and, to some extent “A Brief Natural History of the Pink Flamingo) set the book firmly in the nineties (gosh, they seem so quaint), even though the book came out in the last year of that decade.

The first two essays however, grounded in the late XIX and early XX century are both historical and timeless. The first “Missed Connections: the Passenger Pigeon extinction” tells of a well known episode that is by this time, almost a myth narrative on the way Americans relate to nature. The pigeons were in the millions and were extinct in a few decades of organized hunting (the last specimen died in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914 . A shame, yes. But whose shame? As Price demonstrates, the upper classes, authors of the “shame” speech, who put the blame for the pigeon’s extinction squarely on the “greedy” hands of hunters (poor hunters), quietly expunged themselves from any responsibility. Meanwhile, East Coast gentlemen had made the sport of trap shooting (for which thousands of birds were captured in the Midwest every year and sent by rail to the east) popular, while ladies enjoyed pyramids of pigeons on their lunches at Delmonico’s (all trace of the birds origin disguised under the name Ballotines de Pigeon).

The hilariously titled “When women were women and birds were hats” concerns a little known (completely unknown to me) episode in which hats with not only birds plumes but also whole mounted birds became so fashionable they threatened to drive several species to extinction. How ironic then that women, in the shape of late XIX century womens’ clubs were the ones responsible for annihilating this trend, through fierce campaigning, letter-writing and public speaking. Ah, but how many had bird hats stuffed away in some dark corner of their closet? That is the question.

Somewhere along the line nature became something separate (and therefore timeless, pure, untouchable, etc), probably because those who engaged on building the society’s narrative on nature were indeed separate (or felt separate) from it. Nature ceased to be something you ate, transformed, built and needed, into something you are political about, without having to consider how much of your daily life is intertwined with it. Nature as “out there” Price explains is a mind set. One that isn’t necessarily good for us or nature.

Does it matter that Thoreau went to his mama’s home almost every other day while living “alone” at Walden Pond? Quammen thinks it doesn’t; I beg to differ. Price would probably want to know what he was doing at mom’s place – staring at her bird hats?

Clara, Zamba & Sharon

"Clara's Grand Tour - travels with a rhinoceros in eighteenth century Europe" - Glynys Ridley
"Zamba - the true story of the greatest lion that ever lived" - Ralph Helfer
"The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw - one woman's fight to save the world's most beautiful bird" - Bruce Barcott

“Clara’s Grand Tour” suffers from the plight of the history writer: lack of personal documentation.

It’s all very well to know the baby rhino was bought by a Dutch sail man and brought home to the Dutch Republic and to have some documentation proving her appearance in public in the European Continent, some references in letters or books about her passage and many famous paintings. But at the end of the day Glynys Ridley had to base Clara’s story on very little hard evidence and the reader will surely feel it.

For starters there are many “he must have thought/remembered/planned” sort of constructions that merely highlight the fact that we don’t know what happened. We don’t know for sure Clara was transported by water in some portions of her journey (though Ridley makes a good argument), we don’t know for sure all the places she might have travelled to, or how many made up her entourage, and what kind of difficulties beset her path. If Michael Allin, author of “Zarafa” was able to draw on the extensive correspondence between Ètienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and the Mayor of Marseilles as the giraffe made her way to Paris, Douwemout Van der Meer, the Dutch who bought the rhino was obviously not the journal keeping or letter writing sort and it’s a darn pity. I mean, really, if you’re going to bring home an animal no-one’s ever seen and parade it across the land, isn’t the least you could do to drop a few lines about the whole thing? Maybe it’s the lack of documentation but Van der Meer struck me as a cold fish. I figure if he truly loved Clara he would have written a book about her.

Like Ralph Helfer did, about his beloved lion Zamba. “The true story of the greatest lion that ever lived” might be pegged as a light read (a weekend or long afternoon will definitely kill the beast) if it wasn’t for the fact that you keep getting a headache from all the moments when you hold back the tears.



Helfer was one of those little boys who dreamt of having a lion (they are not the stuff of fiction; I live with one; a grown up one) but he actually made good on his dream. And after his absolute nightmare of a childhood he deserved it. An entrepreneurial young man if there ever was one, he started his animal rental business/ pet store barely out of high-school, and pretty soon got his own ranch where he amassed hundreds of animals used on Hollywood productions.

One day he got a call and a few weeks later a crate: inside was a lion cub that would become the most accomplished show-piece of his ground-breaking “affection training”. Zamba would be able to play with children and lay among lambs but his most incredible trait was the deep friendship (for there is no other name for it) he formed with Helfer in the 18 years he lived. In those years I think they must have been apart few times.

More and more I am awe of people who can have such a bond with wild animals. Our domesticated animals are awesome of course, but, like ourselves they have strayed a little from the deep voice of Nature. A wild animal magnifies that sound within us with every breath.

Of course, if we keep going this way we might just eradicate most wild animals in a few centuries (certainly we seem to be on the way to killing off every large predator around). “The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw” documents what happens when a woman stands up between profit and nature. It isn’t pretty.

Bruce Barcott’s book is a gem and I hope he gets some sort of award (or several). In his real life “Pelican Brief” he tells the story of a corrupt government (in Belize) a greedy Canadian company (Fortis) and the outsider: Sharon Matola an American who arrived in the country in the eighties, and despite having built single handedly its first zoo is still about a hundred years short of being considered anything other than an outsider. Especially when she starts meddling with a proposed dam, to be built on the last nesting site of the endangered scarlet macaw.

Look, I’m not even giving you a summary. Everyone should read this to understand what greedy corporations and governments are doing everywhere: destroying the environment for a quick buck. Oh, and be particularly suspicious when they start shouting “public interest!” because in most cases, such as this one, the general public reaps absolutely no reward. Only a tax hike and more poverty.

Barcott doen’st just stick to the story at hand but digresses into nearby themes which is the way I like it. I know I got a much needed lesson on the workings, history and pros and cons of dams. We should all be more educated about this stuff. So go ahead and read it. I’d be absolutely shocked if you didn’t love it. But be prepared: you will get very, very angry.