Leila Philip gives us a brief history of beavers in the United States. For those of you who have not yet heard, beavers were a kind of a big deal before the white man nearly wiped them out to make a buck. They are still a big deal, environmentally speaking, but these days they occupy more of a subculture in the popular consciousness. In any case, Philip provides a personal tour of some beaver-relevant sights and figures: modern trapping, Johann Jacob Astor, Dorothy Richards, Grey Owl, indigenous stories and traditions, a little genocide (no tour of US history is complete without it), and some effluvial geomorphology.
This book is the product of a tremendous amount of research and a deep personal interest. Philip has invested a lot of time in this subject. It feels cruel to criticize work that took so much work, but the strongest praise I can come up with for this volume is “it’s fine”. Philip’s personal fascination with the beaver is largely unmoving, and the gonzo-journalism she uses to tell her stories makes her presence unavoidable. She ponders and queries and wonder and wanders and feels many feelings about the beavers in her neighborhood, but these provide little to the reader. I can’t help imagine that this would be a more useful book without her in it.
Books are, of course, more than just useful, and while I personally found little of interest in Philip’s personal questing, her poetic musings may be just what you’re looking for. She certainly provides ample references and rabbit-holes for further research. There’s a lot of history and a heaping helping of journalism covering both research and the modern fur trade. None of it, however, leads anywhere in particular over the course of this volume. Make no mistake, I am a beaver believer, and will eagerly recommend Goldfarb’s “Eager” to anyone who so much as glances at a water shortage. Flawed though it may be, it had a clear point to make. Philip does not seem to have a clear message, and while she provides a bounty of tales, I just can’t help but imagine that the primary sources would be more informative than her meandering synopses.