Posted here Sunday, September 19, 2004 at 9:50:36 AM 
Books in the NYT this morning. The place of nature
http://www.nytimes.com/pages/books/index.html
But as magnificent and successful as they are, there is something wrong with the peregrine. That's why Tennant is in that old airplane, a guest of the Army Chemical Corps, which is trying to figure out where these falcons go when they migrate. The Army wants to know because in the tissue and bones of these tough little birds resides the residue of the millions of gallons of pesticides that keep American farms productive. Falcons are at the top of their food chain, which means they eat creatures that eat the insects that ingest the deadly chemicals. This accumulation of poisons has brought the peregrine to the brink of extinction. The Army studies the falcons not because it loves them, but because it hopes to figure out what is going to happen to them, and by extension to us, and to prepare for the worst.
and from Joce Carol Oates
OYCE CAROL OATES'S gravely ambitious new novel is set at Niagara Falls, and you practically need a rain slicker to read it. As usual, Oates pours out her story in great cascading sheets of prose in which words, sentences, paragraphs, even chapters often seem as insignificant individually as drops of water in the massive falls, their only function to contribute, by sheer volume, to the persistent fine spray of actions, perceptions and metaphors that is this writer's idea of a novel, and to the constant dull roar of Meaning that ''The Falls,'' like all her fiction, aims to generate.
Her method, that is to say, has always been to overwhelm, to awe, to wear her readers down with the relentless pounding of her sensibility. But enough. Niagara Falls is such an apt metaphor for Joyce Carol Oates's force-of-nature aesthetic that the temptation to elaborate it further is nearly irresistible. In that direction, however, lies madness -- which, according to one of the book's epigraphs, attributed to a Dr. Moses Blaine, happens to be a possible consequence of allowing oneself to linger too long in the mysterious presence of the falls. Writing a hundred years or so ago, Dr. Blaine identified ''an uncanny effect called the hydracropsychic,'' a ''morbid condition'' that has been known to ''render even the will of the active, robust man in the prime of life temporarily invalid, as if under the spell of a malevolent hypnotist,'' with the result, in the direst cases, that ''the unfortunate victim throws himself to his doom if he is not prevented.''
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