Search Results for: Jennifer Ackerman

This summer I admittedly wanted light reading. With the world in such critical condition and the summer weather so extreme, I just needed a break from my usual heavy history or world events books.

So, I started out with Mark Kurlansky’s The Core of an Onion. A lot of thought was not put into that choice; the author is known to me – he’s a good one having written two of my favourites: Salt and Paper – and I have a “meh” relationship with the subject. It was on the sale table at Book City (as are most of my book choices). In other words, there wasn’t much else that was available at the time, having just finished the very intense Fire Weather, so I picked it up. It was cute; I learned a few things about onions. The recipes at the end weren’t vegan…. That’s really all there is to say.

Then, looking for something else, a person at the bookstore recommended The Soul of an Octopus to me when I was checking out options in the nature section. Lucky me!

Written by Sy Montgomery and published in 2015, this is probably the best known of her MANY books. She writes about nature, obviously, but she does it with a very personal touch. Much like Jennifer Ackerman whose bird books I read on my year off, Sy writes in what I would call a “warming” style. I felt endorphins calming me while I was reading the book on the subway, bus, or streetcar. This book literally made me cry on the subway home during the week before school started this August (2025). No one rushed to help me, just so you know.

Sy befriends humans (employees and fellow volunteers) and octopuses alike at the New England Aquarium where she falls in love with octopuses almost from the start and interacts with them, frequently – literally putting her hands in the water to touch their tentacles, or, rather for them to touch her hands. She is inspired to learn how to scuba dive in order to see octopuses in their natural habitat. And sadly, she experiences the deaths of young Kali and senior Octavia. Probably one of the lasting things I will always remember from this book is the information about the short life span of octopuses, living only one to five years. Nature works in surprising ways; elephants, also very clever animals, live for maybe 60 to 70 years.

Like other readers who have reviewed it, I don’t think this is a perfect book. It’s rather simplistic, especially in comparison to fellow nature writer Jennifer Ackerman’s meticulously researched work, in my opinion. To clarify, I have not read any scientific articles or books about octopuses. It’s a bit anthropomorphic, though humans are generally so in our impressions of the animals closest to us. And, it’s about captive animals rather than wild ones, for the most part. While I admit that I visited many zoos and aquariums when I was young, I haven’t been to an aquarium since 2006 when we went to the fantastic Monterey Bay Aquarium, and I haven’t been to a zoo also since we went to the famous San Diego Zoo on the same trip. As a person (and vegan) who loves animals and nature in general, I don’t love visiting zoos to see animals in unfortunate, cramped captive situations. On the other hand, I have two cats and I ride horses. Am I hypocritical? Probably. Just fyi, I’ve never eaten octopus.

I don’t mind too much that the author didn’t approach the consciousness topic very deeply. I don’t need to be persuaded that animals have consciousness, intelligence, emotions, etc. Philosophy is not something I am interested in. I just live and think and don’t really have a structural methodology to my thinking. So be it.

Overall, on the one hand I loved the octopuses and the cast of human characters who gather round the tanks (and the pickle barrel where Kali lived). And I appreciate Sy’s kindness – she emailed me back a lovely personal note when I emailed her as I almost always do when I finish a book. Though, on the other hand, I didn’t find it to be nuclear physics. That’s okay. I’ll probably pick up another one or two of Sy’s books, and I will try to use some of the writing to lure my students into reading anything other than texts.

It is difficult to write about The Hanging of Angelique (2006) because it is both so thorough and so sad. Though it is a biography of sorts, it’s an unconventional one in that so little is known about the subject, Marie-Joseph Angelique, a slave in New France in the 1700s. Yes, slavery existed in Canada. Afua Cooper, a very well known and accomplished history professor and poet, takes it on with what one can only call an aggressive (in a good way) approach. She destroys the myth that Canada’s past is slavery-free.

Because Angelique’s life story was not recorded in her own words, Cooper fills in the gaps in Angelique’s life in two ways: she dives into the details of slavery in “Canada” (which of course did not exist as a country at the time) and the slave trade which brought her there from Portugal; she also provides interesting and insightful speculations on how she thinks Angelique might have felt. Along the way, there is a lot of time spent on the “justice” system of New France because Angelique was accused of burning down the house she lived in. In turn, the fire spread and destroyed a chunk of Montreal. She was found guilty, tortured, and killed. Cooper has made excellent use of the court records from the time to show how quick to judgement her accusers were.

Angelique is portrayed by Cooper as a forthright young woman (29 when she was killed) who challenged norms and sought freedom and independence, hence her desire to return to Portugal. Even though Cooper believes Angelique probably did start the fire, she is empathetic about the constraints under which Angelique lived. In a way, she restores Angelique to the full personhood denied her by the legality of slavery in New France.

Just as every Canadian should know about the history of colonization’s effect on Indigenous people, they should also be aware of the realities of colonization and slavery. I for one felt enlightened by the book but depressed that, once again, my history education at university did not live up to the truth. This year in world history class I will make sure that my students understand that slavery and the slave trade were both global and local.

My second ‘best book’ choice is much more in the entertaining and charming vein. In What an Owl Knows Jennifer Ackerman has written a love letter to owls. Ackerman is a well known writer on the topic of birds. Her knowledge is wide. Her respect for her subjects is very strong. Diving deeply into owls, she compares them to other birds, draws on bird research she covered in her previous books, and paints them as absolutely diverse and unique.

Who knew that owl behaviour is so different from species to species? I, being a bird lover but not one familiar with owls, tend – like most people – to generalize owls. Well, no more. There are big owls, small owls, medium owls, tiny owls. There are burrowing owls, owls that nest in snag (a word new to me), owls that roost in the hundreds in trees in Serbia. There are owls that migrate vast distances. There are even some owls that hunt in the day time, not at night. Of course there are a lot of words devoted to owl communication: the toots, hoots, screeches, shrieks, and so on.

I love that she has written so much on the various ingenious ways that owl researchers have devised to study them, whether through netting, observation, or nano-technology tracking (except for the owls that are too small to carry such backpacks). These researchers and volunteers are incredibly devoted to wildlife and endure difficult conditions to improve the science of owls. Ackerman has also visited many rehabilitation facilities where injured owls are both prepped for release into the wild or trained for captive lives as educational ambassadors of their species.

Inevitably, Ackerman must write about the potential fate of owls in the climate crisis in which we live. As for many other animals, it is a sad tale of decline. Yet owls, like others, are showing some signs of adaptation. Let us hope that more and more people, not just birders and ornithologists, take up the call to protect and conserve the owl habitats that shelter these incredible, intelligent and diverse animals.