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This book could be summed up as: science doesn’t know much about eels but let’s speculate.
I’m honestly unclear on the point of the book. Most books about animals are jam-packed with facts and fun tidbits but we simply don’t know much about eels so a lot of this book is tangents about other animals, more memoir-style reflections than expected, and the history of how we came to know each of the few slivers of knowledge we’ve obtained.
What I didn’t like (this boils down to mostly pacing/organization):
-The Book of Eels begins by stating all the facts we know about eels (very few as we discover) and then works through the history of how they were painstakingly discovered. The author frequently said “Aristotle didn’t know yet about x” when discussing his erroneous misconceptions, which is unusual for a history book, normally we start with the oldest info and work our way to the newest.
-About 80% of the way through, the author starts talking about a massive tracking study of 700 eels someone conducted - which was highly informative and yet was not mentioned until Chapter 15. There were a lot of interesting tidbits revealed in that study, I can’t believe none of them came up sooner.
-Also not mentioned until Chapter 15: the existence of the Japanese eel. The whole book the author made it sound like there were only two types, European and American, and that was it. Suddenly in Chapter 15 we learn not only that Japanese eels exists, but also that Japanese scientists have successfully found their spawning grounds, found 3 alive adults in that area, and also artificially bred them successfully. This is huge news compared to what success they’ve had finding the same info for the other two species (no success, to be clear) and yet this was only mentioned in passing in Chapter 15?
-A full chapter is dedicated to discussing the details of other animals that have gone extinct, I suppose to illustrate the point that the eel could also go extinct. However I do understand the concept of extinction, I don’t know if we needed an in depth analysis of dodo birds and the steller’s sea cow.
-Speaking of extinction, we only learn in the second to last chapter that eels are quite threatened and a lot of countries have taken major strides to ban/restrict fishing for them. This is a pretty important fact (especially given that we know so little else about them) I am surprised the author waited so long to reveal it.
-Unexpectedly long and detailed description of his father dying of cancer. There are many soliloquies about the two of them fishing for eels together in the author’s childhood so I knew his father is an important figure in his life but this chapter was still unexpected.
Interesting parts:
-The first chapter where we learned the overview of the animal was great and very interesting. We also learned about “the eel question” which is a great name and an enduring mystery
-I enjoyed the philosophical discussion of time, and how time must be different for an eel because it’s not necessarily correlated to aging or seasons as it is for humans.
-More philosophical discussion: we cannot think about, understand, or even conceive of how beings with such different senses experience the world. Eg we can understand how echolocation works and we can potentially use it ourselves but we do not know what it is to BE a bat with that sense whose brain and processing is extremely different than ours.
-Discussions of the various philosophers (including Aristotle and Freud) work on eels was interesting. I didn’t know so many people, starting centuries ago, had dedicated so much time and energy to answering the eel question, which is still to this day unanswered. A constant reminder that science doesn’t know everything.
Overall I did learn some things but I was disappointed. I barely know more know than when I started. I can’t believe this is called The Book of Eels, what a misnomer.
I’m honestly unclear on the point of the book. Most books about animals are jam-packed with facts and fun tidbits but we simply don’t know much about eels so a lot of this book is tangents about other animals, more memoir-style reflections than expected, and the history of how we came to know each of the few slivers of knowledge we’ve obtained.
What I didn’t like (this boils down to mostly pacing/organization):
-The Book of Eels begins by stating all the facts we know about eels (very few as we discover) and then works through the history of how they were painstakingly discovered. The author frequently said “Aristotle didn’t know yet about x” when discussing his erroneous misconceptions, which is unusual for a history book, normally we start with the oldest info and work our way to the newest.
-About 80% of the way through, the author starts talking about a massive tracking study of 700 eels someone conducted - which was highly informative and yet was not mentioned until Chapter 15. There were a lot of interesting tidbits revealed in that study, I can’t believe none of them came up sooner.
-Also not mentioned until Chapter 15: the existence of the Japanese eel. The whole book the author made it sound like there were only two types, European and American, and that was it. Suddenly in Chapter 15 we learn not only that Japanese eels exists, but also that Japanese scientists have successfully found their spawning grounds, found 3 alive adults in that area, and also artificially bred them successfully. This is huge news compared to what success they’ve had finding the same info for the other two species (no success, to be clear) and yet this was only mentioned in passing in Chapter 15?
-A full chapter is dedicated to discussing the details of other animals that have gone extinct, I suppose to illustrate the point that the eel could also go extinct. However I do understand the concept of extinction, I don’t know if we needed an in depth analysis of dodo birds and the steller’s sea cow.
-Speaking of extinction, we only learn in the second to last chapter that eels are quite threatened and a lot of countries have taken major strides to ban/restrict fishing for them. This is a pretty important fact (especially given that we know so little else about them) I am surprised the author waited so long to reveal it.
-Unexpectedly long and detailed description of his father dying of cancer. There are many soliloquies about the two of them fishing for eels together in the author’s childhood so I knew his father is an important figure in his life but this chapter was still unexpected.
Interesting parts:
-The first chapter where we learned the overview of the animal was great and very interesting. We also learned about “the eel question” which is a great name and an enduring mystery
-I enjoyed the philosophical discussion of time, and how time must be different for an eel because it’s not necessarily correlated to aging or seasons as it is for humans.
-More philosophical discussion: we cannot think about, understand, or even conceive of how beings with such different senses experience the world. Eg we can understand how echolocation works and we can potentially use it ourselves but we do not know what it is to BE a bat with that sense whose brain and processing is extremely different than ours.
-Discussions of the various philosophers (including Aristotle and Freud) work on eels was interesting. I didn’t know so many people, starting centuries ago, had dedicated so much time and energy to answering the eel question, which is still to this day unanswered. A constant reminder that science doesn’t know everything.
Overall I did learn some things but I was disappointed. I barely know more know than when I started. I can’t believe this is called The Book of Eels, what a misnomer.