In the past two years, bird watchers have been arguing about names. First, about whether the well-respected Audubon Society should keep its name despite broad knowledge that its namesake held slaves. Soon after this debate reached a fever pitch, in 2022, the American Ornithological Society announced it would begin renaming all birds named after people, due to the colonial implications.
All this is to say, Lulu Miller may have a damn point about scientists who love classifying things. Is it possible to categorize without hierarchizing. Or is naming just a precursor to oppression? Do we love order because it allows for security…the type of security we gain by subjugating others? These questions are at the heart of Miller’s winding work, part memoir, part science and part biography; I was dubious for the first third that this would knit together. But in the end, I feel Miller has built a web of connections across science and how we see the world.
With gorgeous prose, Miller introduces us to David Starr Jordan, his childhood curiosities, his adolescent passion for nature, and ultimately his rise to power that he used to advocate for killing people who he perceived as lesser than himself. You don’t see this coming right away; Miller knits it in like a twist. This structure for a book was interesting to me. Miller comes from the world of radio and podcasting. This story structure made me think a lot about the differences between how nonfiction books and podcasts are built. Podcasts have the detailed, storytelling hook and often drop a bomb mid show…to pull you in. However, in the book, I’m not sure this worked because for a long time I was unclear on Miller’s position. Which was…unsettling, because by the Stanford chapters, it’s clear he’s some kind of villain. By the end of the book, I was trying to find his grave so I could make sure to spit on it if it was ever in town.
Despite that doubt, you cannot deny this is a fucking compelling story. There are earthquakes, murders, societal evil and fish! (or are there?) By the second half, I was seated and ready to receive every damning portrait Miller painted of this man. A few months before this, for the first time in my life, I had learned of Buck vs. Bell, how it was still the law of the land. The gruesome details provided here of Starr Jordan and Priddy’s campaign to cleanse the country of the “unfit” is an indictment of a country that ate this garbage up and made it the doctrine we live by still.
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That’s the end of my formal review, here are three other thoughts I had reading this book:
1. I’m glad you fucking hated Galesburg David. We hate you too. (The academic wing of Lombard College where he taught would eventually be absorbed by my college, Knox College). May the Illinois Prairie winds freeze you to fucking death again in hell!
2. Also, the religious arm of Lombard would eventually become Meadville Lombard Theological School, where many UU ministers attend. My own church’s reverend did an entire sermon on UU’s links to the eugenics movement (including Jordan) last year which was fascinating and widely based on Miller’s book. Almost every book published at the time by Jordan was published by UUs through Beacon Press. Terrifying to see how entrenched this movement was in a religion considered liberal minded, even at the time.
3. My senior capstone project for my literature degree was weirdly similarly focused to the themes in this book. The theme of the term was Bodies on Display and my paper focused on disability and how human’s categorize the other in Mantel’s The Giant O’Brien and I’m so mad I cannot find it on my laptop right now.