The Guardian has a review of one of my favorite books of the last few years. Lulu Miller's "Why Fish Don't Exist" is about a few thing all woven together. It's first a biography of David Starr Jordan, who was the founding president of Stanford University. He was a prodiguous ichthyologist whose team classified around a fifth of all the fish known today. Add in the love story, a philosophical discussion of life (what is a fish?!?), a murder mystery at the end, and you have a book that is hard to put down!
Miller, an American science journalist, first latched on to Jordan’s story while in the throes of heartbreak, shame and annihilating depression, seeing him as an exemplar of perseverance against the odds. In 1883, a fewyears into his fish-collecting career, a bolt of lightning set fire to Jordan’s laboratory, incinerating every specimen and document. Undeterred, he began all over again, only for the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 to reduce his life’s work to a ruin of broken glass, spilt ethanol, rotting flesh and suddenly useless name tags. Jordan pressed on. Whenever he could identify a fish from memory, he sewed a tag into its flesh, insisting that no matter how great the visiting catastrophe, “it is the will of man that shapes the facts”. He epitomised what HG Wells at the time identified as America’s invincible, “ultra-human” faith in its own resilience. Raised by an atheist biochemistwho told her life was chaos without purpose, Miller was entranced by this “wonderful bastard” who believed he could catch the world in a net and force it to make sense.
If you prefer audio, NPR did a great 8 minute interview with Lulu back in 2020.
Scientist David Starr Jordan had spent his career identifying new species of fish.
He carefully stored and tagged thousands of them in glass jars. Then the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906 hit — leaving his life's work in pieces on the floor.