Bev Tappan

Month: November 2006

  • Grayson

    Grayson is a baby gray whale who gets separated from his mother and joins Lynne Cox, a long distance swimmer who is training in the predawn hours off the coast of California near Seal Beach.  When a friend on the dock alerts her to the whale’s presence, she has to swim with him back out to the oil rigs hoping to find the mother, who does finally join them as they are returning to the pier and takes her baby back on their migration to Alaska.

    A small book recounting this rare experience that occurred when Lynne was 17, it also takes the reader into the water to share the sounds, colors, strange sights and unexpected encounters (grunions, rays, dolphins) as well as the tumult of surf and pull of the currents that the swimmer handles with long practiced techniques.  A book to delight all swimmers and snorkelers.

  • Istanbul

    This is Noble Prize winner Pamuk’s memoire about his native city. I read it with the hope of becoming more familiar with Islamic culture. In actuality I learned more about the author’s family life (multiple kinsfolk inhabiting one whole apartment building with whom he spent more time than with his parents, the father being often with another woman and the mother often absent in protest) than with Islam.

    The Bosphorus is the leading character in his story. He loved the water and its traffic at all times and seasons. The degenerating old city he imbued with his own melancholy, tramping its streets night and day instead of going to school, memorizing every shop and building, mourning the faded glory of the Ottoman Empire, but absorbing details for the fabric of his novels. The many black and white photos of scenes gone by contribute to this dark tone.

  • The Creation

    I am puzzled by my own reaction to E.O. Wilson’s THE CREATION, An Appeal to Save Life on Earth, which takes the form of a letter to a Southern Baptist pastor from an eminent entomologist who grew up in that church group.

    I had seized on the book’s title because I had myself been thinking we ought to be able to enlist the aid of devout believers in THE CREATION into urging their followers to start trying to save it from destruction.But on page five Wilson raises the issue that will turn off the fundamentalist: he believes that human centered ethics and preparation for the afterlife are the only things that matter, and the Second Coming is imminent and therefore the condition of the planet is of little consequence. Such preachers will never have picked up his book in the first place, let alone pursued it.

    So Wilson’s elegant descriptions of the incredibly complex, multiplicitous, most as yet not even identified organisms of this planet, their rapid rate of extinction, the utter dependence of the human on his biological environment and the relative ease and economy by which sufficient segments of wild areas could be preserved will be appreciated only by liberal and scientifically sophisticated church leaders, such as have begun to show Al Gore’s AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH to their congregations.

    And of course by every wilderness- loving adult and parent of potential biologists.