Publishers Weekly
01/28/2019
In an eclectic book taking in memoir, literary analysis, philosophical rumination, and scientific discourse, British naturalist Dee offers an homage to gulls. He discusses viewing them in the U.K. and South Africa while quoting, at length and almost randomly, the thoughts of various British ornithologists specializing in gulls. He also offers critiques of various literary works that feature these birds, including both Samuel Beckett’s bleak play Endgame and Richard Bach’s kitschy novel Jonathan Livingston Seagull. While intriguing, the disparate parts don’t quite come together. A theme consistent throughout, however, is Dee’s contention that gulls have changed their behavior in response to both climate change and urbanization, moving inland in many cases, and living lives much more entwined with humans. As this has occurred, humans have begun to see gulls as pests, and even to fear their presence. Dee is best at discussing scientific conundrums, such as the genetic advances that have led to taxonomists splitting long-recognized species into newly separate categories that appear, to birders in the field, to be the same. While there’s much to savor, Dee’s scope is so broad that few readers will find their attention held throughout. (Mar.)
From the Publisher
Landfill is an erudite meditation on these former seabirds — in literature, science and culture — and their symbiotic relationship with us within the natural world."—Toronto Star
“Landfill is an important and entirely brilliant book. It’s a love letter to gulls and their charged relationship with humans, but it’s also a deep meditation on difficulty and waste, on the beauty of the disregarded, and on what we make of matter out of place. There’s love and death here, fear, fascination, hope, and the breaking of the world. Dee has written an absolute triumph.”—Helen Macdonald, author of H Is for Hawk
“The British literature of birds that includes Gilbert White with his swifts and martins, Helen Macdonald with her hawks, is a rich one. But Tim Dee’s own obsession with gulls also leads him to contemplate the landfills over which they often preside and the alarming changes to our landscapes with which they are associated. His alertness to factors in ecological health results not in a jeremiad, however, but instead in an exploration of surprising parallels between evolution in the biological realm and the slow siftings of memory and culture. Landfill is a remarkably venturesome, robustly voiced, and illuminating book.”—John Elder, author of Reading the Mountains of Home
“Like coyotes, ravens, raccoons, and other resourceful urban wildlife, gulls frequently face our scorn, and sometimes our bullets. In his delightful jaunt through gull taxonomy, behavior, and lore, Tim Dee casts his feathered protagonists as indomitable heroes of the Anthropocene—thriving in our cities, colonizing our culture, and repurposing our trash as treasure. Next time a gull snatches your fries, you’ll find yourself not cursing a petty thief, but admiring one of our planet’s grittiest, savviest survivors.”—Ben Goldfarb, author of Eager
“Tim Dee’s restive and gorgeous prose pulls readers into the wilds of the modern urban landscape, where gulls and humans wander side-by-side with ancient poets, Victorian novelists, and Madagascar nighthawks. In this small book Dee asks—and beautifully begins to answer—one of the largest questions of our time: How do we live with attentive grace and wisdom alongside the varied coinhabitants of our imperiled, complex, and beloved earth?”—Lyanda Lynn Haupt, author of Mozart’s Starling and Crow Planet
“Evolution is fluid, and the urban gulls of Tim Dee’s Landfill embody this ever-changing world in action. Tracking difficult-to-categorize gulls and the people who know their habits best, Dee alerts us to the heavy-laden meanings we lay on the wings of others, even as he revels the ways in which gulls continue to fly beyond our grasp. Familiarity need not breed contempt. As Dee shows, it can breed fascination.”—Gavin Van Horn, author of The Way of Coyote
