Customer Reviews

And No Birds Sing: A True Ecological Thriller Set in a Tropical Paradise

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This account of efforts to understand and deal with threatened exotic-caused extinctions on Guam is a gem. The paper back's blurbs focus on Jaffe's "ecological detective thriller." But it's the seamlessness of the book's widely-informed joined elements -- including biographical and political sketches of great pith, accessible population biology, and How Modern Science Works to try to save avian species -- that's most compelling. This deftness in weaving many individually fascinating threads recalled for me Neal Ascherson's astonishing "Black Sea."

The paperback's Index lists only passing references to DDT -- on pages 26, 27 and 72. Because the bad guy is not a chemical, not one of our products. No, he's one of us. And after the paucity and untimeliness of the legislative response to the Guamanian situation had sunk into my consciousness, it was ironic that in the end, an air force base on the island established the 50-acre "environmental reclamation experiment" Jaffe hopes could begin to turn it all around. Like the ending of William Golding's little masterpiece, with the navy warship rescuing the tribe of island-stranded boys from themselves.

I bought this book because I moved to Guam and a search for books about Guam didn't bring up much. It was a well written and interesting book, but I wonder if everything in it is true. I know, for instance, that the monitor lizards they claim are a dull brown are actually a brilliant rainbow of colors that show as mostly light green. The Tangantangan that covers the island is not a vine, its a shrub and here in Guam, away from its natural habitat, it grows to small tree size.

My God! You won't find any birds singing in this masterpiece! Rachel Carson has nothing on this guy! The DDT chapter broke my heart!!!