User Reviews
Rating: really liked it
There are books, and then there are the life-changing sorts of books. For me, this is one of the latter.
This is a memoir that details a time in the author's life when she was sorely in need of a role model. She had recently made a huge, life-ruining mistake, destroying a relationship she valued, when she came across a story of how a historical figure, taxonomist David Starr Jordan, in the wake of an earthquake, starting pinning nametags to the dead fish specimens he worked so hard to catalog so that never again would a California earthquake threaten to upend his progress. Miller couldn't get the image of him poking lifeless fish bodies with pins out of her head. Jordan became a fascinating specimen himself, at least to Miller, and she began doing research on this man who looked at the entropy of the world and raised his fists.
But while Miller unearthed some admirable qualities of the scientist - things she could use to inform the type of person she wished to become - she also found some very dark secrets lodged in his story, and the whole research process got her to thinking about whether the universe's chaos can actually be tamed.
I enjoyed this book the whole way through, but it was the ending that knocked my socks off. It overturns everything that came before it, but also puts the rest of the book into perspective. It's the most brilliant ending to any book I've ever read and was literally jaw-dropping.
It's a stunning book, basically. One of my all-time favorite works of nonfiction. I rave about it more over on Booktube!
Rating: really liked it
I cannot fully express how perfect this book was for reading during COVID-19 crisis. It's perfect. It's Chaos, it's order, it's loss, it's love.
Rating: really liked it
Audiobook read by the author, Lulu Miller
This was a book that I appreciated more than really enjoyed.
.... My mind drifted off to much...
.... it took me forever to understand what the author was trying to say. She was trying to figure out chaos from Jordon, ( he had plenty in his life), and how it affected her life.
....it’s still a little puzzling why Lulu picked David Starr Jordon to study in relationship to her needs.
....Lulu thought Jordon had a handle on life - and she might learn how to do the same if she studied him.
....And what did the title mean? Symbolically it represents loss I suppose.
The sad truth: my favorite part of the book was the epilogue. It was the most personal- about ‘Lulu’.
as....
...many parts of this book went right over my head.
....I’m sure I didn’t understand half of it ( my problem; no fault of the author)
....I did learn a ‘little’ .... simply by sticking to it.
Things I learned:
....Lulu likes fish.
....David Starr Jordon ( 1851-1931), was the founding president of Stanford University. I had no idea about this, prior to this book. He was an educator, scientist, biology teacher, peace activist, explorer, a taxonomist, and was especially known for being an ichthyologist...(a branch of zoology studying fish)
..... many schools around the country were named after David Starr Jordon.
....Lulu was interested in Jordan as a way of discovering what kept him motivated during a time when she was dealing with depression. And remember..: she liked fish -as much as Jordon liked fish.
....Jordon discovered about 20% of fish - their names and fish-characteristics.
....Jordon was an advocate for eugenics ( legal sterilization for the ‘feeble minded).... YUCKY!
Like I said, much of this book went over my head… I didn’t understand the the overall purpose... not ‘gut level experientially’, anyway.
It’s part biography, part philosophy, psychology, relationship driven, murder mystery, love story, mental health, fish details, memoir, and part coming of age.
Basically... I tried ( gave it my campers Girl Scout attention)
But....
... this book is simply a little weird and quirky. I wasn’t passionately connected.
I liked Lulu’s - audio-speaking voice ...but shame on me... I just wasn’t interested enough in Jordon.
His connection with the SF 1906 earthquake was a little thought-provoking...( his fish specimens came crashing down), but I’m still not sure what insights I was to have taken in.
I ‘was’ interested in Lulu’s personal life,
and loved her ‘love-story’ ending - where her happy self shines!
Overall....
I appreciated the few things I learned - and the author’s work, but it didn’t ‘wow’ me.
Rating: really liked it
Absolutely wondrous.
Rating: really liked it
Trigger Warnings : Rape, Eugenics, Nazism, Forced Sterilization, Racism, Ableism, Childhood Incarceration. I probably missed some of them in my list but just know this covers a lot of hard to read topics.
I
annotated and
highlighted .... that's how much I loved this book.
I was tentative at times; I was only reading this in preparation for a convocation coming's up this fall for uni. However, this won me over in a somewhat disjointed but ultimately elegant blending of nonfiction (which I tend to hate)... a biography of
David Starr Jordan and a memoir of the author herself.
Initially, as an aspiring anthropologist and a uni student, I kept thinking about all the contemporaries or predecessors of Jordan that would have been more interesting for me to read about like the more obvious taxonomist - Linnaeus. I didn't really care about the life story of someone who studied fish, however, Jordan's profession and focus didn't stop this narrative from exploring deep important philosophical and political beliefs that ran head long into ethical issues. In many ways, Jordan's inability to only focus on
his fish pushed him headlong into one of America's most shameful "scientific" developments... eugenics.
My junior year of high school, I took AP Gov and we discussed required court cases that overturned or upheld prior precedent. The case from this book (Buck v. Bell) came up in our discussion of Roe v. Wade as a case that was somewhat overturned by Roe, which has been dealt a fatal blow this week (I tend to avoid politics on here because we're all here to read books, however, this framed my context by which I read this book). But to focus specifically, (view spoiler)
[ the precedence / legal mandate that was given by Carrie Buck losing in court, this highlights dramatic injustices as a result of eugenics and people like Jordan who wrote scientific research and funded actions that harmed over 70,000 people in the US. One shocking stat from this book was that 1/3 of all Puerto Rican women were sterilized by the federal government between 1930-1968. It gave me new context to the movement for Puerto Rico to be granted independence (hide spoiler)] To be honest, I thought this review would go in a different direction but I got to writing and this is what stuck with me. However, I will not leave this review having failed to discuss the interwoven memoir found here. At first, I was confused why the hell Miller found her muse/role model in an old white former President of Stanford who was obsessed with fish. But in truth, this wasn't a matter of having a role model but being able to find the positives of someone (the fish) and the failings (eugenics, etc.) that permeate everyone. Miller attempts to reconcile the nihilistic philosophy of her father and her own hope and depression for the future. In the process, she wrote a book that touched my soul and made me cry because it gave me hope... in the similarities of our siblings and our mutual identity as bisexual woman. At 20 years old, this book reminds to have a drive for the future but also be realistic per the fact that life will be hard.
A unexpected
5 stars for the "fish" and the bis.
Rating: really liked it
I wanted to like this more. Miller is a gifted writer and her subject is fascinating, and she does a good job of untangling the various threads that make David Starr Jordan both compelling and fascinating.
Unfortunately, I couldn't get past the tone of hokey cuteness. (Miller's bio says she is a "frequent contributor to Radiolab, which I find nearly insufferable for this exact tone.) The jokey tone is at best irritating, and at worst, as when the writer refers to a dictator responsible for the death of 6 million Jews as "some German guy named Hitler," it makes the book occasionally unbearable.
Rating: really liked it
Her life unraveling, a failed suicide attempt, and NPR reporter Lulu Miller finds herself searching for a way out of the chaos of her life. She becomes fascinated with David Starr Jordan, a taxidermist, who spent his life up to then, collecting and labeling fish. He traveled the world to find as many different examples, it was his life's work. A collection he would lose most of in the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco. What fascinated Miller was that he didn't give up, he saved what he could, found a new, secure way of labeling and went on. How could a person be that optimistic?
She started researching his life and found more than she bargained for, Jordan was not quite the upstanding person she originally thought. Successful yes, he became the first President of Standford University. He suffered personal losses and continued on. He was though, a believer of eugenics, the pilot program for Hitler's final solution. Some startling information on this program and how long it lasted. He would also become embroiled in a murder mystery.
Part memoir, part biography, part a look at our past history, this was a well written and unusual story.
As far as why fish don't exist, you'll have to read and find the answer yourself.
ARC from Edelweiss.
Rating: really liked it
I had a hard time with this one. It was well written, felt well researched, and the audiobook was a solid performance by the author. I'm not surprised at the book's overall rating, and think if it had covered almost any other subject I would've enjoyed it a lot more. But I went into it already knowing that David Starr Jordan was a bastard eugenicist, and it made reading the first 75% of this book and its glowing account of his life and work and perseverance uncomfortable to the point of excruciating. By the time we finally got to reckoning with the profound damage he'd done, I'd given up hope that the author was even going to address it at all; and though I was impressed by how it was eventually handled and how thoroughly those beliefs were condemned, it felt like far too little too late. It felt to me as though the author was more (or at least equally) distraught at discovering her hero was a flawed individual than at the immense and immeasurable horror his beliefs and power and actions enabled him to inflict. And that's not even counting the fact that he definitely murdered that lady, I mean, holy shit this dude was literal trash.
I think a lot of people will be able to enjoy this book much more than I did, and I don't really fault them for it. As a neurodivergent woman of color with a chronic pain disorder, I'm honestly not particularly interested in listening to white women assuaging their guilt over their "problematic faves" on a good day, let alone when that person would have actively called for my forced sterilization (if not death) on the basis of my existence and then went on to directly enable the state's ability to do so. Gotta say, that makes it pretty difficult to engage with descriptions of him as a young man as "sultry" or sympathetic in any imaginable way.
If this book had been any longer, I probably wouldn't have finished it; I think it was the perfect length for the amount of information there was to get across. And the writing is really engaging, even if it was a little too quippy and personable for my usual preferences in nonfiction. I kept listening hoping that the text would eventually address the racism and bigotry, and technically we got there eventually and I do believe it was addressed well. But it just felt a little too dismissive for my tastes; being one of the fathers of American eugenics is not merely an unfortunate footnote in the life of an otherwise-decent man, and I would've liked to see that acknowledged at every turn rather than being used as an emotional "gotcha" toward the end of the book. And I had a difficult time engaging with the author's journey of self-reflection that seemed to be the real crux of the story(view spoiler)
[ mostly because I just don't feel any sympathy for people who cheat on their significant others, even if they're very sad and regretful about it and want to be taken back. I'm glad she eventually moved on, but I spent much of the book just dreading her getting back with "the curly-haired man" (hide spoiler)]. I keep ending up railroaded by white podcast/NPR personalities writing what I think is going to be a nonfiction book and turns out to be a camouflaged memoir, and I'm really over it tbh.
Rating: really liked it
hmmm...this whole book....is about a eugenicist and it tries to bury the lede and shock you that he is one of the most prominent American eugenicists of all time??? seems like something you would find out, say, googling him and not after mapping some weird life plan over this template set by this man who you can tell sucks before the big *reveal".... but regardless of any of that (🤨) it's full of forced themes, overwrought metaphors, and I cannot believe it is book length given this story probably could have been told in 10 pages. reminded me of Devil in the White City because I fucking hate hearing about somebody's eye color or some shit over and over in what is in some sense supposed to be historical and also journalism?
in sum: hate hate loathe entirely
Rating: really liked it
When I give up the fish, I get, at long last, that thing I had been searching for: a mantra, a trick, a prescription for hope. I get the promise that there are good things in store. Not because I deserve them. Not because I worked for them. But because they are as much a part of Chaos as destruction and loss. Life, the flip side of death. Growth, of rot.
Why Fish Don’t Exist is one part memoir, one part discussion of science and its history, and one part biography of David Starr Jordan. Jordan lived a rather remarkable life as a scientist and taxonomist who later became the first President of Stanford University. Yet during his life, he relentlessly overcame the personal losses of his brother, a wife, a daughter, and professional losses as his original records and sample collections were destroyed by a fire in the 1890s, and then destroyed again by the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake.
After her personal life fell apart, the author Lulu Miller begins to research Mr. Jordan to try to understand how he persevered when all seemed lost. As you’d suspect, she finds her answer to how Jordan thrived. What was unexpected was that—at the end of this long search—she largely rejects his answer. While she agrees that his sense of grit and a little bit of positive illusions, i.e. self delusion, were beneficial, she concludes that Jordan’s answer involved a failure to appreciate that his acceptance of Darwinism required giving up his belief that humanity was at the top of a hierarchical ladder and, even worse, a belief in eugenics. Yikes.
Instead, she concludes that people should go on living no matter what because the history of science has shown again and again how little we understand about the world around us. Jordan spent his life cataloguing fish by evolutionary closeness, unwittingly setting in motion the realization among scientists that “fish” isn’t a legitimate category of creature at all.
Why Fish Don’t Exist is a quick read, enhanced by Ms. Miller’s light conversational writing style. Although occasionally treading on heavier subjects (Ms. Miller’s attempted suicide, and I didn’t even mention that Jordan may have gotten away with murder!), it is an optimistic book ultimately about finding hope in the darkness. Recommended, especially to people with an interest in science, but really to anyone going through a difficult time and looking for something hopeful.
Rating: really liked it
lulu miller is more writer than historian. this book - and history - suffers for it.
this book is structured in a strange way. each chapter peels back a different facet of jordan's life analogized to her own, though neither are told chronologically. the first half of the book paints jordan as a quirky but sympathetic character, until a sudden descent into covering up jane stanford's murder and advocating for forced sterilization.
here's the problem: jordan was a eugenicist and white supremacist the whole time. from his first academic job at IU to his presidency at stanford, jordan railed against "unfit genes" polluting "the Anglo-Saxon race." even seemingly redeeming or innocuous aspects, like his religion or his pacificism, ultimately served his white supremacy: jordan disliked war because it decimated the "fittest" of the white male genes.
miller's storytelling requires her to first humanize jordan to the reader, aside from his obsession with categorizing fish, then show how this desire for Order caused his eugenicist views. even in the later part, she describes his distaste for the "unfit," but conveniently skips over his stance that the white race was the fittest. but this is ahistorical: centuries before jordan was born, the taxonomies and methods of western science were invented to justify europeans' mental and physical superiority over those they colonized. jordan's racism doesn't prove the flaws with this scientific approach; rather, both phenomena stemmed from the same root cause (centuries of white supremacy). thus, she sacrifices historical accuracy for the sake of a character arc.
this book was also incredibly whitewashed. the chapter on his eugenicist views somehow barely mentioned race, and when it did, just suggested that discrimination against the "unfit" just happened to have racially disproportionate effects. yet eugenics was always a movement about race. racism was the motivation, not the consequence, of these beliefs. and the framing of "how could a little boy become so evil?" - plus the way miller compared jordan's childhood quirks to her own depression - reminded me of how mental health is always used to solicit empathy for white mass shooters. by framing his life this way, she turns systemic problems - the collusion of western racists and scientists - into psychological ones - jordan's refusal to accept that "we don't matter."
i was looking forward to this book a lot as a story of someone whose sins have disappeared into the shadows - his name was emblazoned across the stanford psych building until 2020. instead, i'm disappointed that this book is how he'll live in the popular consciousness.
Rating: really liked it
On the surface, Why Fish Don’t Exist is a biography of David Starr Jordan, a taxonomist who discovered and named about 20% of the fish known to man. Miller highlights his entire life: from naming stars to naming fish. Jordan was a revolutionary. That’s not to say he did not have his flaws—he had MANY. He was an early proponent of eugenics and encouraged the government to enact legislation that would allow for the legal sterilization of individuals deemed “unfit.” I’m not sure about you, but I didn’t know the US practiced eugenics before Hitler got the idea. He also may have murdered the founding mother of Stanford University, so you know, there’s that.
Remember when I said this book was a biography of David Starr Jordan? Yeah, that’s not all. It’s Miller’s memoir. It’s a reckoning with chaos. It’s a pondering of the meaning of life. David Starr Jordan’s entire life was dedicated to bringing order to the chaos of the world. Miller explains that she found Jordan during a particularly tough time in her life. She was drawn to this man who made sense of the chaos. She needed to know her chaos could be sorted. We’ve all been there; it feels like everything is falling around you and you’re forced to just sit and watch the destruction and all you want is to know you’ll make it out the other side. Eventually, Miller finds that organizing the world feels productive, but small boxes hide beauty. Taming the chaos leads to hidden complexity, dangerous practices (like eugenics), and missed opportunities. Why Fish Don’t Exist is a biography, a memoir, and a coming of age story. It is a beautiful treatise to letting go of our boxes and embracing the chaos.
Rating: really liked it
"Chaos is the only sure thing in this world."I am thankful I learned what this book is about before opening it, rather than just reading it based on the cover. I'd have been disappointed if I'd thought I was going to read a scientific book about fish - er.... non-fish? - and encountered details about the author's personal life and that of taxonomist David Starr Jordan. When I read a science book, I want scientific facts and scientific facts alone.
Why Fish Don't Exist isn't that. Instead, it is a brilliant medley of biography, memoir, science, history of eugenics, and philosophy of life.
Author Lulu Miller writes beautifully and passionately. She is at times witty, at others philosophical. This is her search for meaning in a universe without meaning, in a universe ruled by chaos.
She explores the life of David Starr Jordan, a taxonomist who is credited with discovering over 2,500 species of fish (though we also learn that he himself did not do much of the work, or even discovered them himself. Rather, he accepted credit that should have gone to people, mostly minorities, he had working for him).
As she learns more about this man whom she almost seems obsessed with, Ms Miller realizes he is not the perfect scientist and man she thought him to be. Instead, he was a top leader of the eugenics movement in the US and possibly a murderer.
Ms Miller discusses how what we think is true isn't always so. For instance, we humans have categorized most of the creatures living in the sea as fish and we now know that, scientifically,
fish don't exist!
I won't tell you why. If you're curious, you should pick this book up for yourself. It is fascinating and fun to read.
Rating: really liked it
This book is a memoir. As an inspiration, the author focuses on naturalist David Starr Jordan, who was a world expert on fish. She admired his grit and determination and the success in his field. He was also the President of Stanford and a suspect in the murder, by poison, of Jane Stanford, wife of Leland. He did have a grudge against Jane, given that she threatened to fire him. Her death was timely in that regard. But the author only discovered belatedly that David Starr Jordan was the founder of the American eugenics society, something I've been aware for a long time.
Someone who knew Jordan well said: "he had a terrifying capacity for convincing himself that what he wanted was right." This became a problem when he misinterpreted Darwin. He believed in something he called "degeneration"
"He believed immobile creatures like sea squirts and barnacles had once been higher forms of fish and crabs but had “degenerated” back into lazier, weaker, less complex, less intelligent forms of life, as a result of acquiring resources parasitically. More broadly, he believed that any kind of long-term aid to a creature would result in its eventual physical and cognitive decline. He called this misunderstanding of how nature works “animal pauperism.” So he would alert the public to the dangers of charity, causing, as he believed it did, “the survival of the unfittest.” And recommend the extermination of these “crétins” as the only way to prevent against a worldwide “decay” of the human race."
One Albert Priddy took Jordan at his word.
"Priddy was the slick-haired doctor in charge of the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, in Lynchburg, Virginia. He was a zealous eugenicist, known for having sterilized women for being “man-crazy,” having “wanderlust,” telling “coarse stories,” and even passing notes in class. In 1917, he had been sued by a man named George Mallory for sterilizing his wife and daughter while Mallory had been traveling for work. Dr. Priddy’s justification? That a house full of women with no man in charge must have been a brothel."
In 2007, a historian from the University of Michigan, Alexandra Minna Stern, discovered a set of microfilm reels in an old file cabinet in a government office in Sacramento. On them was a sort of eugenics registry— the names and demographic information of every person sterilized in David Starr Jordan’s adopted home of California from 1919 to 1952. The list was nearly 20,000 people long.
Stern spent years analyzing the records with a team, and together they’ve been able to fill in the picture of what “unfit” really meant, what kinds of people lived inside that category. As Stern writes, those deemed unfit were “often were young women pronounced promiscuous; the sons and daughters of Mexican, Italian, and Japanese immigrants… and men and women who transgressed sexual norms.” Other studies have shown how women of color were disproportionately targeted for sterilization. The US government has admitted to forcefully sterilizing over 2,500 Native American women in the early 1970s. The Eugenics Board of North Carolina sought out and sterilized hundreds of black women during the 1960s and 1970s. And approximately a third of all Puerto Rican women were sterilized by the US government between 1933 and 1968.
The reality is that nearly half of the states still allow for involuntary sterilization of people deemed unfit, only now they use words like “mentally incompetent” or “mentally deficient.” Meanwhile, forced sterilization continues to be performed in the “quiet way” all over the country. Much of it remains undocumented and hard to catch— coercive sterilizations in low-income hospitals, meth clinics, prisons, institutions for people with disabilities, and beyond— but big cases come to light every few years. Over the period of 2006 to 2010, for example, nearly 150 women were illegally sterilized in California prisons, without the women’s consent and occasionally without their knowledge.
Jordan's Eugenics program had a direct effect on the Nazis, who executed on his ideas. This aspect is covered much better in this article than in the book...
https://www.sfgate.com/opinion/articl...
============
How the program continued in California prisons....
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2...
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Information on a documentary about....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbbFo...
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A companion volume of sorts. The author does not say so in the book, but he did say publicly he thought Jordan was guilty.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Rating: really liked it
When I first opened this book, I was expecting more of a biography on the life and studies of taxonomist and former Stanford University President David Starr Jordan. His work in classifying fish was groundbreaking in his day, marred by the destruction of many of his exhibits in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.
Once I began reading, I discovered much more. There were many details about David Starr Jordan and his work, at times perhaps more than I would have liked. However, the details were given in the context of the author’s own unraveling world. Indeed, she says she started the book seeking answers to her own bouts of depression. She had heard the story of Jordan and wondered what kept him motivated, what caused him to start again in the face of scientific devastation? She outlines some of the situations which created her own emotional turmoil and her hopes for what she would find by studying Jordan’s efforts.
In the middle of the book, the book becomes more of a memoir. Her own experiences of love, loss, and eventually, love again. Her bouts with depression, questions of what contributed to it, and how she might overcome it. In the process of examining her own life and it’s turn around, the book morphs again into a possible self-help type guide where someone inclined might find inspiration to move forward in their own life.
This was an interesting book, and one I would recommend to any reader looking for something complex or a little different. The research Miller conducted in order to write details of Jordan’s life was extensive and there are pages upon pages of references for anyone who is interested in using it or others she details to write a research based paper. There is also some intrigue offered, particularly into the death of Stanford’s co-founder Jane Stanford, in case the reader is looking for a little mystery. While at times I wanted to put the book down for a while, becoming overwhelmed with data, it wasn’t long before I found myself picking it back up again, wondering where it was going to go next.
My thanks to Simon and Schuster Publishers and NetGalley for an advanced reader copy of this book in exchange for an objective review.
