Best Of 2011

Photo Courtesy of Animal Planet

This time of year everyone is coming up with their "Best Of" Lists, so not to be outdone, here at Books and Beasts we're offering our choices too.  If you follow the blog, you know that I've reviewed a lot of books and a few movies -- I'm pretty selective in what I include, so everything that I covered is there because I thought it was worth checking out -- even the books I had problems with.  However, even among the best, a few stand out.  So here are my choices for the best animal related offerings of the past year.

1.      Best Fiction -- Again, I've reviewed a lot of great novels and short story collections and all of them are worth your time.  However, there is one novel that stands out this past year among all the rest.  Possum Summer, by Jen K. Bloom is a wonderful children's book that will speak to child in the heart of every reader.  It's the kind of book I loved when I was a kid, and still do.  You can read my review of it here, but you might as well save yourself the time and just rush out and get it.  Not to be missed.

2.      Best Nonfiction -- Same caveat, all the books I've reviewed are important, useful and entertaining (in different combinations, depending on what they were).  But if I have to pick one that most affected me this year, it would be Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend by Susan Orlean.  Wonderful portrait of the dog so famous that when he died they broke into radio broadcasts around the country to announce it.  You can read my review here, but please, get this book, and pass it on to all your dog loving friends.

3.      Best Movie --  This one's easy.  (I haven't seen War Horse yet, but as soon as I do it'll show up here on the blog).  The best animal movie of the year -- and one of the best I've seen in a very long time -- is Rise of the Planet of the Apes.  Yes, it's true, I love it in part because I'm a geek, and there are scenes of Apes running wild through the city and attacking helicopters.  But this is much more intelligent, thoughtful and accurate movie than I ever expected.  The writers obviously did extensive research on chimps raised in captivity, and Caesar -- played by Andy Serkis in a performance that would be nominated for an Oscar if there was any justice in the world -- is the most realistic chimpanzee character ever captured on film.  (Sorry, Cheetah.)  Emotionally, technically, and intellectually the best movie of the year.

The Worst -- I don't usually include a section on "worst" in my blog -- I prefer to use time and space pointing out what's best, and what's important.  But one blog post I wrote this year Tears for Elephants has drawn more hits than anything else I've written.  It's about the sad fate of elephants in Hollywood, including the ones who starred in Water for Elephants.  I gave that book an enthusiastic review, because I think it's great -- but I boycotted the movie, sadly, because I think it could have been great too.  There have been a number of movies this year -- including Hangover 2, Zookeeper, and the new We Bought a Zoo, that made the unfortunate choice of using exotic, wild animals -- a practice that contributes to the abuse, over hunting, and endangerment of these creatures.  You can see my thoughts about it in earlier reviews, but it only makes my Best Movie choice even more notable.  The totally CGI apes in "Rise" are wonderful creations.

4.      Best TV Show -- I haven't reviewed this one yet in the blog, but it's too good not to include.  There are lots of great nature and animal shows on TV, but this one is the best if you're an animal lover -- especially if you're a dog lover -- absolutely if you're a Pit Bull lover. It also happens to be hands down the best reality show going: Pit Bulls and Parolees on Animal Planet. (This is the new favorite show of my canine housemate Lulubelle Dawg, who was also a big fan of Meercat Manner back in the day.) In this day and age, just the idea was audacious.  Let's take two of the most stigmatized groups we can think of, and then let's make an honest, sympathetic, non-sensationalized show about them.  If you've never seen it, the show follows Tia, the woman who runs Villalobos ranch, a rescue facility for pit bulls.  She is helped by her daughters -- who have had difficult lives in their own ways -- and by the parolees she takes on as volunteers.  I don't know of another show on television that deals with second chances, heartbreak, triumph and joy more often.  Oh yeah, and there are Pit Bulls!  What more could you want? 

Well, those are my choices for 2011.  I'd love to hear your thoughts or picks, whether you agree with me or not.  And I look forward to continuing to bring you reviews and information about the wide world of "Books and Beasts".

Readers of Birds and Beasts might also enjoy our sister blog Birdland West, which covers birds and wildlife, mostly in the Seattle Area.

What the Barn Swallows Know

Bird Brain Genius by Ken Korczak

As a bookseller (and as a writer) I have watched the changes sweeping the publishing industry with interest.  The rise of ebooks, and of readers like Kindle and Nook, have not been kind to small sellers, but I still find myself excited by the whole knew frontier opening up for online publishing.  No one seems to know exactly where it's going, and that is always thrilling.  And scary.  As the old Chinese proverb/curse says, we live in interesting times.

The upside of the new formats is the rise of independent publishers, many of them aimed at very specific niches -- erotic paranormal romance or zombie apocalypse fiction -- with their own enthusiastic audiences.  Those who don't spend a lot of time online, or haven't really looked at what's out there, might be surprised.  A new publishing industry is sprouting up, full of diverse voices and perspectives.

The down side is that this new zone, as yet, has very little structure and often lacks the experience, quality control, and filtering that big traditional publishers provide.  In many cases, authors are publishing themselves -- something that has always been an option, but which online sales and marketing, and now ebooks, have made incredibly easy.  The problem is that these books may never have benefited from professional editing and the kind of feedback that authors traditionally receive on the way to print. (Or its electronic equivalent.)

A really good example of both the strengths and the weaknesses of this new paradigm is Bird Brain Genius by Ken Korczak.  The book is available on Amazon Kindle, which is where I stumbled across it.  Korczak provides a little back story -- he says that he witnessed the central events when he was working as a newspaper reporter in 1984, and that it was so unbelievable that neither his editor, nor any of the non-fiction publications he sent it to would publish it.  Finally, he decided to expand it into a short novel.  He makes a point of saying that he no longer cares whether anyone believes it or not, "It's just a great story."

And that, at least, is true.

Bird Bran Genius, set in the farm country of Minnesota, concerns two eccentric, white-trash twins, Cadmus and Buford Dziekonski, who own a failing farm and who happen to be mathematical idiot-savants.  The brothers are not good farmers, and their farm, like most of the farms around, is in trouble.  None-the-less, Cadmus becomes obsessed with a pair of barn swallows -- who he names Sabik and Bellatrix -- who have built their nest across from the brothers' front porch.  Watching the birds -- and "contemplating complex temporal-spatial equations based in chaos theory" -- Cadmus begins to create a bizarre intellectual game. 

... he visualized a three-dimensional grid in the large yard that opened east of the farm house. To that he added four-dimensional space-time continuum factors, which only he could grasp effectively. Cadmus' imaginary grid was rectangular, some 75 yards wide by 50 meters high. It was about 50 meters deep. Within the grid, Cadmus further visualized internal cubical sections, and assigned numerical values to each one of them. He also gave them colors to add more variables. After some practice, his powerful imagination could easily and automatically project this mental grid out into the wide space east of the farm house. Sabik and Bellatrix spent much of their time passing through the imaginary grid as they hunted for insects and returned to their nest where the hungry offspring eagerly swallowed the insect victuals. Cadmus soon became absorbed in his game. He noticed that each time Sabik and Bellatrix passed through his mental grid and intersected the individual values assigned to it, they returned to the nest with a specific score. Sometimes Sabik flew through the grid in a way that earned a very high score. At other times, his score was low, at other times middling. Bellatrix did the same.

And so, Tumulus is born.  A game based on keeping score of the bird's passages through the imaginary grid.  When other people from the town find out about it, they flock to the brothers' farm each evening to listen to Cadmus call the game, complete with its own arcane lexicon and dramatic flourishes. 

"Here comes Sabik ... OH! He enters warbling into Purple Sector 9! MOOLTANNA! A good one! He's down, flicks-back, an astro-turn ... WAIT! YIKES! He flickbacks DOUBLE and comes in for a brood roost vigorous! Terrific score, Sabik!! 389 debens!"

The game becomes such a hit that the townspeople begin betting on it, and soon hundreds and hundreds of dollars are changing hands over every round, even though Cadmus and Buford remain innocent of the gambling.  Cadmus is concerned only with calling the games, keeping his statistics, and with his growing unease at what the statistics suggest.  For the scores of the two birds are steadily increasing.  The birds' performance at Tumulus is improving -- as if the birds understand the game, as if they are deliberately competing.  Buford, for his part, totally rejects that possibility, and becomes obsessed with finding the hidden mathematical artifact that must be skewing Cadmus's data.

Around this story is the bleak picture of traditional farm life dying.  Family farms are being foreclosed, and generations of tradition are disappearing.  There is also a sweet, remarkably innocent and romantic love story between the brothers' niece Minerva and the Farm AG agent, whose job it is to foreclose on the Dziekonski farm.

This is a very compelling story, with something of the flavor of Mark Twain's "What Stumped the Blue Jay".  It is in the sketching of the colorful characters, the description of the town, the playing of the sentimental and wistful romantic subplot -- and most of all in describing the intriguing mystery of the game of Tumulus -- that the book's strengths lay.

But, unfortunately, it has flaws too.  What this feels like, more than anything, is the first draft of a good story by a good writer.  I mentioned earlier the lack of structure and feedback that comes from self-publishing, or publishing outside the traditional mold.  And this book definitely shows that lack.  It has all the kinds of mistakes that every writer makes in early drafts -- punctuation, grammar, shifts in tense, slips in point-of-view, awkward phrasing, and elements of the story that haven't quite jelled.  The kinds of things that a few good readers and a good editor help whip into shape.  It's a testament to the strength of the story, and the author's raw talent, that the book is still engaging despite these problems.

As it stands, Bird Brain Genius is fun, interesting little story whose lack of polish will, unfortunately, stop a lot of readers from getting through it.

With a little editing and little development here and there, it could be a very good book.

Where the Birds Is

The Art of Bird Finding by Pete Dunne

 

"Whether you know it or not," writes Pete Dunne in his new book, The Art of Bird Finding, "you are a bird-finding machine.  Under the shell of your modern veneer, stripped down to raw sensory receptors, Mr. and Mrs. Homo Sapiens are genetically to pick up the clues that say:  LOOK!  LOOK!  BIRD HERE."

That's a comforting thought on frustrating days when I can barely make out any of the tiny songbirds flitting about my yard.  Much less identify the birds I can hear but never quite locate at the park.  Most of us think of ourselves as bird-watchers, although more often the goal seems to be bird identification.  But whatever we're looking for (pun intended) the first step is seeing the birds in the first place.  And Dunne's wonderfully succinct new guide is devoted to helping us do just that.

As a birder, I probably rely too much on my camera.  I'm not fond of binoculars -- mostly because I've never learned to use them effectively, and Dunne has some helpful hints here -- but I found that his discussion of the pros and cons of binoculars applied equally well to how I use the camera. 

Think of the advantages that are diminished or nullified when you bring your binoculars up to your eyes.  Right off the bat, your view of the world is reduced by about ninety-five percent.  Good binoculars offer a field of view of about eight degrees of arc.  Your eyes, with birder-enhanced peripheral vision, give you between 100 and 180 degrees of arc.  You bring binoculars to your eyes, you've just thrown away your greatest bird-finding advantage -- your ability to perceive the whole world in front of you.

I know I've found this to be true of my camera.  In fact, I've found that even though my distance vision is diminished without glasses, standing on my deck bare-eyed I am able to watch the entire yard, watch for the slightest motion or movement.  For me, it is these moments of stillness and receptivity that are among the most rewarding parts of birding. 

Pete Dunne is one of the most prolific and talented bird writers around -- his books include Pete Dunne's Essential Field Guide Companion, The Feather Quest, and the wonderful collection of essay/stories about raptors The Wind Masters.  The Art of Birding shows all his usual strengths.  For almost anyone, at any level, this book is a valuable trip back to the very beginnings of bird watching, a refresher course on what and where to look, and a guide to shifting our perspective. 

Yogi Bera once said that the secret to baseball was just to "hit it where they ain't".  The secret of birding then might be described as "look where they is".  And Pete Dunne will show us how.

(Books and Beast readers might also want to check out the latest post at Birdland West -- "A Flock of New Books for Birders" featuring the best of recent books on birdwatching, gardening and related topics.)