Sunday, August 23rd at 2pm
Allison Pond Park, 430 Prospect Ave (near Brentwood), SINY 10301 (1 block off Henderson Ave). Plenty of free parking on the street.
From “The National Book Review”, an excerpt of an article by Ann Fabian: “An Irresistable Story of Murder, Stanford University, Eugenics and Fish”: “…. Escapist reading leaving you feeling trapped? Dystopian novels landing too close to home? Romance making you grumpy? Thrillers falling flat? Mysteries unrewarding? Let me recommend a book about David Starr Jordan, Stanford University’s first president and the leading ichthyologist of his generation.
University? Fish? Some California pedant? Not ready yet to rush out to your local bookstore?
Can I tempt you with the idea that Jordan may have had a hand in the murder of Jane Stanford, widow of university founder, Leland Stanford? Or with a hint that a campus statue toppled by the San Francisco earthquake of April 1906 will make you laugh? Or with a promise that you’ll understand why (maybe) fish don’t exist.
Jordan is the central figure in Lulu Miller’s small marvel of a book, Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love and the Hidden Order of Life (illustrated with playful drawings by Kate Samworth). Jordan is hardly a household name, but, trust me, the book has payoffs aplenty and you’ll get a glimpse of ideas from philosophy, psychology, and contemporary taxonomy.
Those of you who’ve heard Miller’s stories on “RadioLab” or “This American Life” know her as a gifted reporter with an eye for quirky twists in the history of science. She’s also a master of the breezy prose vernacular of the American podcast where ordinary language is plenty good enough to set out life’s biggest questions.
Miller has more room to play on the pages of her book, where she puts that radio-prose style to good use, leading readers along with amiable chatter but then pulling up short at the edge of something sad, shocking, brutal, horrifying, profound or just uncomfortably personal.
Why Fish Don’t Exist is full of those jittery surprises. Its running theme is the heartbreaking human effort to keep chaos at bay. “My scientist father taught me early that there is no escaping the Second Law of Thermodynamics: entropy is growing, it can never be diminished, no matter what we do,” Miller tells us at the start…. ”
