Reviews with content warning for Ableism - Why Fish Don't Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life

Reviews tagging 'Ableism'

Why Fish Don't Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life by Lulu Miller

90 reviews

asolis's review against another edition

2.5

A mix of memoir, biography, popular science, and a bit of self-help. From childhood, the author is unmoored by her father's nihilistic yet unshakably optimistic approach to life. Here she looks to the life story of David Starr Jordan for perspective.
The content is primarily dedicated to Jordan's story, whom we come to find is a notably repellent human. The author does a good job of giving us a look under the hood at the story of someone who could be considered a scientific hero, and showing the ugliness of bigotry and white supremacist ideology underneath. But the framing presents this in the context of a memoir, even though Miller is stingy with her own story. That, despite its other strengths, makes the book feel unsatisfying.

CW: self harm, substance abuse, sexual assault, state violence

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kayeofswords's review against another edition

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dark emotional informative fast-paced

I don't know whether to give it 4 stars because it was well-written or 3 stars to reflect my subjective impression of it, so I'm not rating it. I had to take some time to journal about the author's view that chaos is the ultimate force of the universe (in an atheistic, not Discordian, way) and the toxic things her father said to her when she was young about not mattering (aren't we actually all seeking a place in a community? isn't that what the question is really about? how could something or someone matter if not indexed against a reference point or, perhaps, a <em>telos</em>? maybe that's a bit too philosophical ...). I was also bullied badly in school, and I empathize with the trauma ... that stuff is hard to work through. It's interesting that she fixated on David Starr Jordan as a way to do research therapy to help herself. I added some content warning info in case anyone is curious about what comes up.

That said, I enjoyed learning more about how taxonomy got started and the ways in which it fed into ideological currents, positive and negative, that have persisted to this day. A lot of DSJ's behavior sounds a bit narcissistic ... easy to fly under the radar earlier in his life, explosive and dangerous the more authority he had. I didn't know anything about him before starting to read this book and wasn't expecting that he would veer from taxonomy into eugenics. That was sobering. Really great structural organization to all of this.

The last 45 seconds of the audiobook epilogue was <em>adorable</em> and five-star.

Also, I'm so happy that fish don't exist. I use it as a generic term for aquatic life in some of my non-Earth specfic and now feel like I can do that with impunity.

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junefish's review against another edition

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adventurous emotional reflective medium-paced

4.25

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caprivoyant's review

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3.5

⚠️ Content Warning for ableism in the form of eugenics and forced sterilization. It's all historical... But horrible.

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katsmedialibrary's review

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3.75

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thehutonfowlslegs's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging funny informative reflective fast-paced

5.0

things found in this book:
• fish
• actually, fish don’t exist, so no fish
• icthyology and taxonomy
• existentialism
• the life of david starr jordan
• the life of lulu miller
• murder
• love
• loss
• darwinism
• eugenics
• attempts to bring order to an ever-chaotic world
• the questioning of everything you think you know
• a single footnote
• a sound clip of the author teaching her child how to say “fish” (provided your reading medium is the audiobook)

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