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Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life
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56
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
68/100Critics
44/100Scholars
Author:
Lulu Miller
Publisher:
Simon Schuster
Date:
April 14, 2020
NPR reporter Lulu Miller delves into the strange life of taxonomist David Starr Jordan, credited with discovering nearly a fifth of the fish known to humans in his day. When the 1906 San Francisco earthquake sent more than a thousand of his discoveries, housed in fragile glass jars, plummeting to the floor, Jordan did not give up but began his tireless work anewâand found new methods for protecting it against loss.
What The Reviewers Say
The book that emerges from her research reads like a podcast episode, blending investigative journalism, biography, and a dash of memoir. The questions posed by Miller’s dive into Jordan’s life are profound and open-ended.
What a delightful book, and what a delightfully provocative title.
Writing about Jordan is a tricky task because of his complex legacy....Lulu Miller does the job with style and intelligence.
Part biography, part natural history, and part memoir with the intrigue of a murder mystery, this slim work is also a philosophical exposition on the human inclination to make order out of chaos.
