by Labmom55 (York,PA): How funny to start Beasts of the Sea right after a re-read of North Woods, given the comparison of this book to Daniel Mason’s. And in one sense, it’s an apt comparison. Instead of a house, there is the Stellar Sea Cow, a mammal which has the sad distinction of being the first mammal to become extinct because of humans. But unlike North Woods, which was consistently strong across different characters and time periods, this is not.
The story begins in 1741 when Captain Bering, George Steller and two boats head east to find a sea route from Siberia to the Americas. They never reach the Americas, instead becoming stranded on one of what would later be named The Commander Islands. I was intrigued by this section. But the next, in 1859, which involved the governor of the Russian territory of Alaska trying to locate the bones of the now extinct creature was dull. Once found they are sent to Helsinki, where a female illustrator is given the job of producing drawings of the bones.
Finally, in 1952, the Museum of Zoology assigned its restorer to put the bones together. This section delves more into bird egg collecting and its effect on bird populations. The entire book tends to read more like narrative nonfiction than fiction. There’s a dryness to the writing style. The author does an excellent job of giving a sense of time and place. Her writing is as precise as the illustrations created by Olson. But at times, I would have preferred that she spent more time on the thoughts of the day – the infallibility of God when creating species and how hard it was to acknowledge the idea of extinction, let alone extinction caused by the actions of man, for example. At least in the final section, the debate among ornithologists about protecting birds vs. collecting eggs to study the birds is more fully fleshed out.
My thanks to Netgalley and Little, Brown and Company or an advance copy of this book
