From Publishers Weekly
It's quite likely that even the most enthusiastic readers of Cannery Row don't know much about Ed Ricketts, the self-taught marine biologist depicted in John Steinbeck's novel as "Doc"—a beer-guzzling bohemian science-philosopher presiding genially over the coastal California town's seedy sardine-packing population of "whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches." Tamm's account of Ricketts's short life (he died in 1948, at age 51, killed while crossing train tracks) is an engrossing memoir. Freelance writer Tamm smartly weaves in-depth literary analysis of Steinbeck's fiction into his narrative, though writing relatively little about mythologist Joseph Campbell's spiritual explorations. But the links drawn among the three friends (though Steinbeck and Campbell soon had a lifelong falling out around marital infidelity) provide a fascinating insight into how art, science and philosophy can nurture, inspire and feed off one another. Tamm writes with impassioned honesty about his subject's many dimensions. Ricketts was a beach bum, philanderer and party-hearty hedonist, but he was also an intuitive ecologist, whose early warnings about sardine over-fishing along the California and Alaskan coasts in the 1930s proved prescient; an environmental visionary, whose dire observations about the impact of industrial effluvia on shoreline habitats in the 1940s went unheeded; and a true renaissance man, whose avant-garde fusion of life and science inspired the lives he touched.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --Ce texte fait référence à l'édition Relié .
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --Ce texte fait référence à l'édition Relié .
Booklist
John Steinbeck's Cannery Row features a boozy, affable, generous, and eccentrically philosophical marine biologist called "Doc," a character based on Steinbeck's close friend, Ricketts. This indelible fictionalization has stood unchallenged by a biographer until now, and it is a boon to meet the man behind the myth. Ricketts was not only the rowdy king of Cannery Row but was also an original and adventurous marine biologist who, without an academic affiliation, formulated a revolutionary view of life's interconnectedness. Poor and under duress, he nonetheless devoted his life to studying the teeming life of the Pacific coast from Baja to British Columbia, developing a radical "biocentric worldview," voicing prescient concerns about marine pollution and exploitation, and working on the now classic Between Pacific Tides. Ricketts never could have conducted his expeditions without Steinbeck's financial support, but as Tamm so perceptively discloses, "Doc" paid his friend back tenfold by providing Steinbeck with the deep ecological vision at the heart of his Nobel Prize-winning books. Amazingly enough, Ricketts also inspired the enormously influential work of another friend, the mythologist Joseph Campbell. Tamm, therefore, presents an affecting and mind-expanding group portrait of three creative thinkers, but Ricketts glows the brightest, a friend to bums and geniuses. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --Ce texte fait référence à l'édition Relié .
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --Ce texte fait référence à l'édition Relié .
