Author Description

Science journalist Oliver Morton will love The Book of Eels. In an Amazon.co.uk interview, Morton, who had just written a book about Mapping Mars, said that bits of the world which fascinated him most were the ones which science could describe brilliantly, but could not begin to explain. That would seem to describe eels quite nicely.Foods go in and out of fashion. The skills of the field and the kitchen develop slowly, refined bit by bit by passing generations--then vanish, in the blink of an eye. Tom Fort's uncategorisable book pays homage to the humble and delicious eel. It is by turns charming, long-winded, and unexpectedly profound. Sunday fishermen will lap up its eel-catching lore, its stirring first-person accounts, and its eccentric historical anecdotes. Armchair naturalists will retire exhausted but happy from Fort's account of the eel's extraordinary life cycle (involving, among other things, an epic circumnavigation of the world). Of course, books of this sort usually end in tears. If your subject is the relationship people have with the natural world, you most often end up having to mourn the affair's recent passing--eradicated by one modern despoliation or another. Fort's book is no exception. Fort feels sure that the eel will survive man. But he wonders whether men will survive in a world where so much knowledge, lore and practice is being sacrificed in the name of industry. Fort believes passionately in craft, and in the kind of knowledge you can gain through the practice of craft. He contrasts this with the way science works, and is both sympathetic and very funny about science's limitations when it comes to answering questions about creatures as elusive and peculiar as his beloved eels. There are, Fort argues, many different kinds of knowledge. The scientific knowledge that informs industry is fine as far as it goes. But it's not enough to do justice to this remarkable creature.--Simon Ings