In the original pitch of this book, I had no idea I was going into this stuff . It was like each of them ended with this promise that if you joined, you'd get it.I think I pictured the meaning or the purpose of life like this little fortune cookie fortune that if you ask the right person or were in the right place, you would learn it and then you'd be okay.
Jordan was a revolutionary. Like, how else do put on our pajamas or make the coffee?I don't know, but I think that there's just a scale of how much we let ourselves give in and probably all kinds of things go into how much we let ourselves give in. How she makes peace with the idea of a man who had done both marvelous and monstrous things involves the book's coup de grâce that upends our idea of what fish (and we) are in the grand scheme of things. Most of all, I appreciated the broader themes that Miller probes in the narrative.I absolutely love how this book was written, incredibly personable while simultaneously informative. [death of a spouse, death of a child, fire, earthquake, forced sterilization, long discussion of eugenics, discussion of rape, discussion of verbal + physical abuse I was blindsided by this extraordinary synthesis of biography, metaphysics, human folly, and memoir. I thoroughly enjoyed the book but found it to be far more than a biography of this American ichthyologist, educator, eugenicist, and peace activist.
Reproduction of material from any Salon pages without written permission is strictly prohibited.
A thin book, yet padded. He eventually became the first president of Stanford University and a vocal leader of the eugenics movement, even writing publications about genetic cleansing.It's a wild ride, with Miller imbuing suspense into this story from a bygone era as each revelation about Jordan becomes more appalling than the last.Along the way, Miller also shares her own personal journey from attempting suicide, and losing and rediscovering love, to finding some sense in her own life through a surprising fish-inspired philosophy (fish-losophy?) . I got to learn about the eugenics movement, and how it really got going here.
We have all these religions telling us it does exist to spook us into being better. Jordan was a revolutionary. We aren’t even the newest creation on the block.” His work in classifying fish was groundbreaking in his day, marred by the destruction of many of his exhibits in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.I cannot fully express how perfect this book was for reading during COVID-19 crisis. Or did he end poorly? All rights reserved. I had known about the nonexistence of fish as a taxonomic classification prior to the book, but I think Lulu Miller has explained it with a lot I would have liked this book even if John Green hadn’t recommended it. There’s more to the story than just this taxonomic activity as they were also the provost of Stanford and had possibly poisoned the widow of the university’s founder, and was an adherent of eugenics which was quite fashionable at that time. He also may have murdered the founding mother of Stanford University, so you know, there’s that.I wanted to like this more. Animals can outperform humans on nearly every measure supposedly associated with our superiority. But it is scary. Through her story of understanding herself and him, she lays out a map of what it means to persist in our passions, the supporting beliefs it takes to do thatI rarely find a book that I want to read it in one sitting. Miller's career in radio started as a producer for the WNYC program Radiolab. I saw his story as an epic and I wanted to heighten that quality . Do I need to immediately rethink that? To remember that behind every ruler there is a ruler. How could a person be that optimistic?When I first opened this book, I was expecting more of a biography on the life and studies of taxonomist and former Stanford University President David Starr Jordan. A very shallow and sketchy memoir of her idolization of, and eventual disillusionment with, David Starr Jordan, an ichthyologist and the first president of Stanford. She now co-hosts the NPR show Invisibilia with Alix Spiegel.“When I give up the fish, I get, at long last, that thing I had been searching for: a mantra, a trick, a prescription for hope. And being like a white man, relatively well-connected white man, and in the 1800s probably helped reinforce that vision.I didn't go that far because the way he behaves I see as far more common.
It's sort of like listening to a longform episode of Radiolab/Invisibilia minus sound effects and quotes... but you get to dive deep into big ideas spun from Lulu Miller's personal experiences, connected to science, history, identity, Ichthyology, and more. PETA suggested calling them sea kittens. To remember that a category is at best a proxy; at worst, a shackle.”“[I]t is our life’s work to mistrust our measures.
Jordan was a revolutionary. Like, how else do put on our pajamas or make the coffee?I don't know, but I think that there's just a scale of how much we let ourselves give in and probably all kinds of things go into how much we let ourselves give in. How she makes peace with the idea of a man who had done both marvelous and monstrous things involves the book's coup de grâce that upends our idea of what fish (and we) are in the grand scheme of things. Most of all, I appreciated the broader themes that Miller probes in the narrative.I absolutely love how this book was written, incredibly personable while simultaneously informative. [death of a spouse, death of a child, fire, earthquake, forced sterilization, long discussion of eugenics, discussion of rape, discussion of verbal + physical abuse I was blindsided by this extraordinary synthesis of biography, metaphysics, human folly, and memoir. I thoroughly enjoyed the book but found it to be far more than a biography of this American ichthyologist, educator, eugenicist, and peace activist.
Reproduction of material from any Salon pages without written permission is strictly prohibited.
A thin book, yet padded. He eventually became the first president of Stanford University and a vocal leader of the eugenics movement, even writing publications about genetic cleansing.It's a wild ride, with Miller imbuing suspense into this story from a bygone era as each revelation about Jordan becomes more appalling than the last.Along the way, Miller also shares her own personal journey from attempting suicide, and losing and rediscovering love, to finding some sense in her own life through a surprising fish-inspired philosophy (fish-losophy?) . I got to learn about the eugenics movement, and how it really got going here.
We have all these religions telling us it does exist to spook us into being better. Jordan was a revolutionary. We aren’t even the newest creation on the block.” His work in classifying fish was groundbreaking in his day, marred by the destruction of many of his exhibits in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.I cannot fully express how perfect this book was for reading during COVID-19 crisis. Or did he end poorly? All rights reserved. I had known about the nonexistence of fish as a taxonomic classification prior to the book, but I think Lulu Miller has explained it with a lot I would have liked this book even if John Green hadn’t recommended it. There’s more to the story than just this taxonomic activity as they were also the provost of Stanford and had possibly poisoned the widow of the university’s founder, and was an adherent of eugenics which was quite fashionable at that time. He also may have murdered the founding mother of Stanford University, so you know, there’s that.I wanted to like this more. Animals can outperform humans on nearly every measure supposedly associated with our superiority. But it is scary. Through her story of understanding herself and him, she lays out a map of what it means to persist in our passions, the supporting beliefs it takes to do thatI rarely find a book that I want to read it in one sitting. Miller's career in radio started as a producer for the WNYC program Radiolab. I saw his story as an epic and I wanted to heighten that quality . Do I need to immediately rethink that? To remember that behind every ruler there is a ruler. How could a person be that optimistic?When I first opened this book, I was expecting more of a biography on the life and studies of taxonomist and former Stanford University President David Starr Jordan. A very shallow and sketchy memoir of her idolization of, and eventual disillusionment with, David Starr Jordan, an ichthyologist and the first president of Stanford. She now co-hosts the NPR show Invisibilia with Alix Spiegel.“When I give up the fish, I get, at long last, that thing I had been searching for: a mantra, a trick, a prescription for hope. And being like a white man, relatively well-connected white man, and in the 1800s probably helped reinforce that vision.I didn't go that far because the way he behaves I see as far more common.
It's sort of like listening to a longform episode of Radiolab/Invisibilia minus sound effects and quotes... but you get to dive deep into big ideas spun from Lulu Miller's personal experiences, connected to science, history, identity, Ichthyology, and more. PETA suggested calling them sea kittens. To remember that a category is at best a proxy; at worst, a shackle.”“[I]t is our life’s work to mistrust our measures.