The Book of Eels

Well handled familiar alternation between animal facts - the mysterious for millenia and perhaps still now lifecycle of eels from the Sargasso Sea to freshwater streams and back - epistemology - eels role in slow scientific discovery and in fear and myth as a way of knowing - and memoir - growing up fishing for eels with his father, cultural foodways and facing fears and unknowns, late in life family revelations.

Got a bit tedious in the end, I wanted a fact book on eels. This was like that for the first half but ended up trying to be too philosophical

[TW: cruelty to animals, beyond simply plain fishing.]

First things first: eels truly are fascinating, not just in themselves but as an indicator of what a wondrous world we live in and how many mysteries remain. This book does a wonderful job covering the eel’s biology and the convoluted history of how humans have learned it, step by painstaking step. There’s much more: an informative and respectful deep dive into the life and work of Rachel Carson, and ditto but slightly less so on Sigmund Freud; personal memoir focusing on Svensson’s relationship with his father; musings on ecology; a baffling tangent on religion that I had to skip. Worthy subjects all, but the jumping-around between threads, in linear book form, did not work for me.

For a shorter, more focused intro to the fascination of eels, I emphatically recommend this Radiolab episode.