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graywacke 's review for:
informative
reflective
fast-paced
Lulu Miller, and NPR personality, is an excellent writer and reader. This book feels like a high energy NPR story throughout. And I would like to tell you how wonderful it is. It's entertaining throughout. It has some issues.
Miller mainly tells the story of David Star Jordan, a pioneering fish taxonomist born in 1851, who would become the first president of Stanford University, and later... a pioneering American Eugenicist. Miller mixes in elements of her own life. The title has to with the fact the oddity that fish don't form an independent phylogenetic unit because of some of the oddities of evolution. A major phylogenic branch of fish evolved into tetrapods and then all land vertebrates and humans. As a result, some fish are phylogenetically closer to humans then they are to other fish.
So my issues are the Miller makes some weird extreme statements. They aren't criminal, but they're weird. For example, she pines at one point about how important David Star Jordan was a guide to her life (not because of his bad stuff). That's weird. Why would anyone be so attached to a little-known taxonomist. that they would find it troubling when he maybe couldn't "guide" her? It sounds unlikely, which would make this dishonest. But regardless, it's weird. And there are other occurrences like this. She has a line about learning and getting hopeful about Jordan long after she had begun to deeply study him. How could she not know a eugenicist was going to be a creep? Doesn't ring right. Some of her statements are really nice, if general - about entropy, and trying to find meaning, and about how eugenicists fundamentally failed to under the importance of variety in evolution (even though Darwin made a point of highlighting this). But her efforts to life this book up from the basic story to something more meaningful is forced as often as it works, and I mainly only remember the forced aspects.
She does put a nice biography of a creepy guy. Jordan overcame a lot of challenges, but he was a tyrant, quick to destroy critics. He had a trump-like over-self-confidence, leading him to pursue and manipulate the science to prove ideas he was sure were right. Even his positive biographers have been uncomfortable with the nature of his over-confidence. His collecting was largely about going around the world and seeing what the fishermen caught, often hiring collectors, but never crediting them. He would poison tide pools with strychnine, then collect all the dead animals. And Miller indicates he was a murdered. Stanford University was founded in 1885 by Leland and Jane Stanford. They were Jordan's bosses. Jane Stanford died of strychnine in 1905, her second time being poisoned by it. Jordan clearly covered this up, confusing the history.
Miller's personal life is about being non-religious, having parents tell her life has no meaning, dealing with depression, while being and managing being bisexual.
So a strange, problematic, but entertaining book.
Miller mainly tells the story of David Star Jordan, a pioneering fish taxonomist born in 1851, who would become the first president of Stanford University, and later... a pioneering American Eugenicist. Miller mixes in elements of her own life. The title has to with the fact the oddity that fish don't form an independent phylogenetic unit because of some of the oddities of evolution. A major phylogenic branch of fish evolved into tetrapods and then all land vertebrates and humans. As a result, some fish are phylogenetically closer to humans then they are to other fish.
So my issues are the Miller makes some weird extreme statements. They aren't criminal, but they're weird. For example, she pines at one point about how important David Star Jordan was a guide to her life (not because of his bad stuff). That's weird. Why would anyone be so attached to a little-known taxonomist. that they would find it troubling when he maybe couldn't "guide" her? It sounds unlikely, which would make this dishonest. But regardless, it's weird. And there are other occurrences like this. She has a line about learning and getting hopeful about Jordan long after she had begun to deeply study him. How could she not know a eugenicist was going to be a creep? Doesn't ring right. Some of her statements are really nice, if general - about entropy, and trying to find meaning, and about how eugenicists fundamentally failed to under the importance of variety in evolution (even though Darwin made a point of highlighting this). But her efforts to life this book up from the basic story to something more meaningful is forced as often as it works, and I mainly only remember the forced aspects.
She does put a nice biography of a creepy guy. Jordan overcame a lot of challenges, but he was a tyrant, quick to destroy critics. He had a trump-like over-self-confidence, leading him to pursue and manipulate the science to prove ideas he was sure were right. Even his positive biographers have been uncomfortable with the nature of his over-confidence. His collecting was largely about going around the world and seeing what the fishermen caught, often hiring collectors, but never crediting them. He would poison tide pools with strychnine, then collect all the dead animals. And Miller indicates he was a murdered. Stanford University was founded in 1885 by Leland and Jane Stanford. They were Jordan's bosses. Jane Stanford died of strychnine in 1905, her second time being poisoned by it. Jordan clearly covered this up, confusing the history.
Miller's personal life is about being non-religious, having parents tell her life has no meaning, dealing with depression, while being and managing being bisexual.
So a strange, problematic, but entertaining book.