By Wendy Williams (Simon & Schuster, 240 pages)
The next time you think one of your relatives is weird, breathe deeply and think of Miriam Rothschild. Her father collected fleas.
“A flea lover since childhood,” he amassed more than 260,000 of them, writes Wendy Williams in The Language of Butterflies, explaining how Miriam Rothschild, a self-educated scientist and butterfly enthusiast, came naturally to the study of entomology.
Or consider Herman Strecker, a 19th-century stone carver who collected 50,000 butterflies. “He had a long face and a long neck and an even longer, out-of-control beard. He looked like Moses. He had deep-sunken grief-filled eyes. He lived the unkempt life of a zealot, going so far as to crawl in between his bedsheets with his pants and boots on,” Williams writes.
These unusual men, however, are peripheral characters in the story of butterflies, which Williams, a New England science writer, tells with aplomb. You may not care about butterflies. Don’t let that keep you from this book, which is more interesting than anything you will see on TV this week.
Even the most butterfly-illiterate people are vaguely aware of the monarch butterfly’s astonishing migration from Canada to Mexico, which Williams explains compellingly, having witnessed their arrival on a mountaintop, an experience that she calls “otherworldly.”
“The migration of the monarchs from points as far north as Canada all the way south to these particular mountaintops is a world phenomenon that belongs to everyone on the planet,” she writes. “It’s a source of global joy, like the migration of the wildebeest on the Serengeti Plain or the migration of gray whales off the west coast of North America.
“They are all following the sun, just as we would if we could.”
The monarch is the most famous of butterflies, and the most brutal — the males rape the females. You’d think they wouldn’t have the physiology for violence, but butterflies, Williams writes, are surprisingly sturdy. They look fragile yet have “robust” exoskeletons built for endurance.
But when it comes to interesting life stories, the monarchs have serious competition from a butterfly variety called Fender’s blue, which pupates underground, cared for by ants. When the butterfly emerges, the ants carry it to freedom above ground, as if the insect’s triumph is their own.
It’s an almost unbelievable story of a symbiotic relationship between creatures that we scarcely notice exist. The ants are motivated by the “invisible hand” described by 18th-century economist Adam Smith. Their reward is the sweet fluid that the caterpillar secretes, the ant equivalent of candy; in exchange for the treat, the ants provide protection from predators that the butterfly-to-be needs.
But it’s not the strange circumstances of butterfly existence that cause humans to be fascinated by them, Williams says. It’s their colors. “Your brain processes color information much, much more quickly than the information about movement. … What that means is that the color of an apple — or, in a spillover effect, the color of a butterfly — hits us fast and hard, in the gut.”
As flying insects with scales on their wings, moths and butterflies are cut from the same cloth, so to speak. Both belong to the second-largest category of insects, lepidoptera. But the drab moth repels us while the colorful butterfly entrances. Williams believes butterflies satisfy an innate craving for color in the human brain. In her 60s she set out to discover why the insect inspires biologists, hoarders and thieves — yes, there is a “international underground Lepidoptera market,” in case you were wondering.
The Language of Butterflies equally entrances, thanks to its author. This is not the Wendy Williams, radio host and lifestyle columnist, whose titles include Is the Bitch Dead or What? but the Wendy Williams who wrote a thoughtful history of the horse and is the co-author of 2007’s Cape Wind, a sympathetic examination of wind farming proposed off Cape Cod. Her voice is engaging and friendly; her enthusiasm for exploration, infectious. (This is a woman who keeps in her car a wide variety of footwear — hiking boots, riding boots, water shoes and so forth — just in case.)
Unlike wind farming, the subject of butterflies, approached deftly, can be apolitical. Williams worries about climate change and its effect on butterflies, wondering if one day their migration might be the stuff of lore, like the migration of passenger pigeons and North American bison. But she is neither a scold nor a Cassandra, and her tone is ebullient and hopeful. The only question she doesn’t answer adequately is what, exactly, one does with the corpses of 260,000 fleas. A
BOOK NOTES
Recent events in Minnesota and New York City’s Central Park invite a reflection on the experience of being black in America. For people who haven’t had that experience, there are books.
A fine place to start is A Particular Kind of Black Man, which we reviewed here last year. (Simon & Schuster hardcover, paperback coming in August.) It’s a novel, but Tope Folarin draws on his experiences as a Nigerian-American growing up in Utah to craft a deeply moving, and sometimes painful, story.
In the opening pages the protagonist remembers an experience from his childhood: An elderly woman would sometimes appear by his side while he walked to school, often patting his head affectionately. One day she said to him sweetly, “If you’re a good boy here on earth, you can serve me in heaven.”
The child was just 5 and saw the promise as generous and magical, not the punch in the gut that it is to the reader. Folarin has said this exchange happened to him. This wasn’t 100 years ago. Folarin is 38.
On Twitter, some readers are asking for advice on books that can help them better understand the American-American experience. One title that keeps coming up is The New Jim Crow, Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Michelle Alexander’s book came out in 2010, but a 10th-anniversary paperback edition was released in January by The New Press.
Also new in paperback is Mitchell S. Jackson’s Survival Math, an acclaimed memoir of growing up black in predominantly white Oregon. The prologue is a poignant letter to the first of the family to come from Cape Verde to America, in the 1700s. “This ain’t our Eden,” it concludes.
Two years old but No. 1 on Amazon for a while last week is Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility, Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism (Beacon Press). “I have never met a white person without an opinion on racism,” she writes. “… And white people’s opinions on racism tend to be strong. Yet race relations are profoundly complex. We must be willing to consider that unless we have devoted intentional and ongoing study, our opinions are necessarily uninformed, even ignorant.”
Also suddenly a bestseller is 2019’s How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi, and another title co-written by Kendi, Stamped, Racism, Anti Racism, and You, co-author Jason Reynolds (Little, Brown).
To America’s credit, many of these titles are now on backorder. There will be more.