Discoveries: ‘The Last Tortoise’
The Last Tortoise
A Tale of Extinction in Our Lifetime
Craig B. Stanford
Harvard University Press: 240 pp., $23.95
Longevity, toughness and wisdom are the qualities we associate with this iconic animal. Craig B. Stanford shows how their habitat is threatened and takes us to the markets where they are sold for food, as pets and even as soup bowls. First: When we talk about species, we rely on traditional, sometimes obsolete classifications. It becomes extremely important to update these classifications when we are talking about habitat and vulnerability to poachers and developers. “In recent years the study of genetics has superseded traditional rationales for species categories based purely on external appearance,” Stanford writes. He relies heavily on the work of Peter Pritchard, the Jane Goodall of the tortoise world. He writes about conservationists and their efforts to combat extinction risk, but he is not hopeful: “Once the wild populations are virtually exterminated,” a few will “hang on only in zoos and in the hands of wealthy private collectors. They will no longer be a species in the evolutionary sense. They will just be a scattered gene pool, a few protected, priceless animals locked up in cages.” Here’s a chance to know a little about them before they are gone.
Walking Home
A Traveler in the Alaskan Wilderness
Lynn Schooler
Bloomsbury: 272 pp., $25
Lynn Schooler does what we all, from time to time, long to do. He just starts walking: away from a crumbling marriage, away from a house he has labored over for years, away from the death of a close friend. A close encounter with a grizzly is the final sign. Schooler takes off across Alaska — 100 miles, by boat and on foot, through the wilderness along the coast of Lituya Bay. Schooler is not a novice when it comes to survival: He lived for 40 years in Alaska and worked as a guide before beginning his journey. He makes lists, plans routes, thinks of all the reasons not to go. Schooler is past middle age and the trip provides not just time to think but a challenge: Can he still do it? Or is he too old? “Being peeled down to the point where you are nothing more than just another mammal trying desperately to survive puts things in perspective,” he writes after his return. “Looking into the dull eyes of that grizzly undressed me in a way that I had never been undressed before, reminding me that the ‘real’ world is still out there, and that it is a medieval place where nature is not always pretty and humans are not always in charge.” The prose is simple and clear; there is very little daylight between Schooler and the world he walks through.
One More Theory About Happiness
Paul Guest
Ecco: 208 pp., $24.99
When Paul Guest was 12, riding a bike down a huge hill, his brakes failed. When he hit a ditch, he went flying over the handlebars and broke his neck. Paul lost the use of his arms and hands. He learned to drive a wheelchair using his breath. He finished high school; went on to college and graduate school. He writes using a mouth stick and is an accomplished poet. Guest remembers; gently, carefully, painfully, each new milestone from the accident forward. He is blessed with a sharp sense of humor: “Would I still be able to play the piano?” he jokes when the doctors tell his family that he will be a quadriplegic. He puts his body in the hands of various stewards and focuses intently, not just on his own transformation, but on the reactions of those around him. Guest writes about his first kiss (when he was 15), about the time he was mugged in his wheelchair in an elevator, about how he chose the life of a writer. “To return to that moment when everything broke apart,” he writes, “when I was lifted up from the ground like the child I was and then lowered back like fragility itself is strange. Every day I am touched by that day’s permanency, its long, dark, deepening shadow.” Guest falls in love, gets engaged, writes a book. And it is an effervescent book: irrepressible, buoyant.
Salter Reynolds is a writer in Los Angeles.
