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The Log from the Sea of Cortez
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The Log from the Sea of Cortez
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The Log from the Sea of Cortez
Audiobook11 hours

The Log from the Sea of Cortez

Written by John Steinbeck

Narrated by Joe Barrett

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

4/5

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Currently unavailable

Currently unavailable

About this audiobook

This exciting day-by-day account of Steinbeck's trip to the Gulf of California with biologist Ed Ricketts, drawn from the longer Sea of Cortez, is a wonderful combination of science, philosophy, and high-spirited adventure.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateJun 1, 2012
ISBN9781101592908
Unavailable
The Log from the Sea of Cortez
Author

John Steinbeck

John Steinbeck (Salinas, 1902 - Nueva York, 1968). Narrador y dramaturgo estadounidense. Estudió en la Universidad de Stanford, pero desde muy joven tuvo que trabajar duramente como albañil, jornalero rural, agrimensor o empleado de tienda. En la década de 1930 describió la pobreza que acompañó a la Depresión económica y tuvo su primer reconocimiento crítico con la novela Tortilla Flat, en 1935. Sus novelas se sitúan dentro de la corriente naturalista o del realismo social americano. Su estilo, heredero del naturalismo y próximo al periodismo, se sustenta sin embargo en una gran carga de emotividad en los argumentos y en el simbolismo presente en las situaciones y personajes que crea, como ocurre en sus obras mayores: De ratones y hombres (1937), Las uvas de la ira (1939) y Al este del Edén (1952). Obtuvo el premio Nobel en 1962.

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Reviews for The Log from the Sea of Cortez

Rating: 3.8154506798283263 out of 5 stars
4/5

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  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This book came highly recommended, and I came away disappointed. I had high hopes for a travel book, or journal, from John Steinbeck. But, while the book is detailed in terms of descriptions of things done, and some technical stuff, for the most part, it was dry. I expect travel books/journals to have life. This did not.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I was especially taken with the last section found in the appendix that honored the life and death of Steinbeck's great friend Ed Ricketts. What a wonderful tribute to a person who meant so much to so many in that part of the country. The entire book was certainly an enjoyable and satisfying read. It was good to hear this voice again.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I got this book to read the tribute to Ed Ricketts. I'm not a huge Steinbeck fan so skipped the actual Log from the Sea. I found out about the tribute from the author Craig Johnson, he claims he reads this often. While I enjoyed it, I don't think I'll be doing that. However, Ricketts sounds like he was a fascinating man who died too young, and as a good friend of Steinbeck I completely understand his writing this tribute.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5

    Each and every summer, I have a tradition of reading a work from my favorite author, John Steinbeck. (In recent years, I've actually been sneaking in two or three works a year; otherwise, it will be another eighteen years before I complete his catalogue of written works.) For this year's read, I settled on my first non-fiction selection from Steinbeck: The Log from the Sea of Cortez.


    In 1940, Steinbeck, best-friend Ed Ricketts, and a crew of seamen set off for the Gulf of California to observe, catalog, and collect the marine animals they discovered along the shores. (Steinbeck's wife, Carol, had been along on the voyage as well, but is never mentioned; the fact that the couple divorced shortly after their return may have much to do with her omission). Ricketts was a marine biologist by profession and Steinbeck had a strong interest in the subject.


    The resulting book chronicling this six week voyage combines the voices of Steinbeck and Ricketts, although distinguishing the authorship of original thought is improbable: Steinbeck has taken Ricketts' log, combined it with his own ideas and wording, and the conclusion is a work of two very much alike, yet different people.


    The book itself is hard to define. It is part scientific journal: during their thirty collecting stations, they find crabs, oysters, worms, sea-cucumbers, nudibranchs, rays, urchins, and much more. And of course the reader is informed of these discoveries, along with any commentaries on the tide, the relationship between species, and any abnormalities. Perhaps it is just my love for Steinbeck, but I did find these collection reports interesting for the first half of the book; eventually, I grew a little tired with them.


    The Log is part philosophy: Steinbeck and Ricketts both enjoyed talking about philosophical matters. Interspersed in this log are philosophical thoughts that are explored, and explored, and further explored. While there were some interesting thoughts amongst these "ramblings," they also grew tiresome.


    It is part sociology: During their voyage, the crew of The Western Flyer made stops along the coasts and interacted with many of the locals. Some of these interactions are quite humorous while others are depressing. The observations made by Steinbeck, however, are gorgeous, and it is clear to see how his fiction can paint cultures and groups of people so vividly.


    It is part Steinbeck: The detailed descriptions, the people, the humor, the insight—it is all very much the same Steinbeck of The Grapes of Wrath, Tortilla Flat, and The Pearl. You find Steinbeck's fictional characters in the likes of Ricketts, Sparky, and Tiny, as well as forgotten villagers, Mexican authorities, and enthusiastic errand boys.


    As an added bonus, Steinbeck insisted that the publisher include a short profile about Ed Ricketts. The resulting "About Ed Ricketts," which I believe to be included in most if not all editions, is entertaining and provides further insight into not only Ricketts, but Steinbeck as well.


    Oddly, as I walk away from this book, I find a deeper appreciation for a Steinbeck book I read several years ago—Tortilla Flat. While I did enjoy it, it is the one Steinbeck book I have read where I felt the most disappointment. I now realize that this is because I didn't understand the camaraderie and adventure Steinbeck had with his friends, which adds so much to its reading. Having read The Log from the Sea of Cortez, I find a believability and understanding in Tortilla Flat that I lacked in my initial reading, and I look forward to some of Steinbeck's other relatively lighthearted titles.

  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Having somewhat enjoyed Steinbeck's other foray into non-fictional travel narrative, Travels with Charley, not as much as a few of his better novels but more than several others, I was looking forward to reading this---especially since its subject is a presumably scientific expedition taken with his friend, marine biologist Ed Ricketts. But I started getting a little worried toward the end of the introduction when he described what he called "the mental provisioning of our expedition": "Let us...not be betrayed by this myth of permanent objective reality," he wrote, in what I thought might be a pretentious rationalization for shoddy work or just so much hot air, but then it got worse. "And if we seem a small factor in a huge pattern, nevertheless it is of relative importance. We take a tiny colony of soft corals from a rock in a little water world. And that isn't terribly important to the tide pool. Fifty miles away the Japanese shrimp boats are dredging with overlapping scoops, bringing up tons of shrimps, rapidly destroying the species so that it may never come back, and with the species destroying the ecological balance of the whole region. That isn't very important in the world." (Funny how, three quarters of a century later, there doesn't seem to be any shortage of shrimp.) "And thousands of miles away the great bombs are falling and the stars are not moved thereby. None of it is important or all of it is."Wait a minute..."important"? to whom (or what)? to what end? and by what standard? In fact, since "importance" is a relational concept, to say everything is important is indeed equivalent to saying nothing is. In which case, why should he bother to write the book, or I to read it? Still, I thought, in practice he will have to implicitly give importance to some things over others by what he chooses to include (and to exclude), and when he's actually dealing with the facts of the concrete reality he so blithely discounts as a myth instead of trying to sound smart, perhaps he won't get in so far over his head.And indeed, the first few chapters of the log seem to get off to a promising start...but unfortunately, it's not long before he goes off on even more hopelessly inane pseudo-philosophical ramblings. One of the longest (if not THE longest) chapters in the book, comprising a significant chunk of it, is devoted to Steinbeck's speculations about what he calls "non-teleological or 'is' thinking" versus "the usual cause-effect methods" of "teleological thinking". "Non-teleological ideas derive through 'is' thinking, associated with natural selection as Darwin seems to have understood it," he writes...but he simply doesn't know what he was talking about, as Darwin *was* a teleologist and his theory of natural selection specifically is a teleological one (indeed, in response to "a brief appreciation of Darwin" by Asa Gray published in the June 1874 issue of Nature in which Gray noted that Darwin hadn't destroyed teleology, as both his supporters and detractors generally believed, but rather gave it a scientific grounding, Darwin wrote to Gray, "What you say about Teleology pleases me especially and I do not think anyone else has ever noted that"). In any case, how Steinbeck can characterize Darwinian selection as merely descriptive "is" thinking, "attempting at most to answer the already sufficiently difficult questions *what* or *how*", and not "cause-effect" thinking answering the question "*why*" is completely beyond me.It's especially baffling since Steinbeck is at least sophisticated enough to make a distinction between supernatural (or "spiritual") forms of teleology and natural (or "physical") ones, and yet rejects the latter along with the former. The great 20th-century naturalist Ernst Mayr, in an essay on "Teleology", recognized four valid categories of end-directed processes or phenomena within biology (two of which he termed "teleomatic" and "teleonomic" to distinguish them from the invalid and non-existent "cosmic teleology"). Mayr wrote (almost as if in direct response to Steinbeck), "To be sure, questions that begin with 'what?' and 'how?' are sufficient for explanation in the physical sciences. However, since 1859 [the year of the publication of Darwin's The Origin of Species] no explanation in the biological sciences has been complete until a third kind of question was asked and answered: 'why?' It is the evolutionary causation and its explanation that is asked for in this question. Anyone who eliminates evolutionary 'why' questions closes the door on a large area of biological research."Of course, all this takes Steinbeck's views here far too seriously, as he goes on to say that non-teleological thinking "by inferred definition...transcends the realm of thinking possibilities.... And the non-causal or non-blaming viewpoint seems to us very often relatively to represent the 'new thing,' the Hegelian 'Christ-child' which arises emergently from the union of two opposing viewpoints, such as those of phsyical and spiritual teleologies..." This is, of course, pure, unadulterated nonsense, and he goes on like this at some length...though how exactly non-teleological thinking is supposed to go *beyond* teleological thinking and be some Hegelian synthesis of the antitheses of physical and spiritual teleologies, your guess is as good as mine, as Steinbeck certainly never offers any coherent explanation.Okay, so all that out of the way, what about the actual scientific portion of the expedition and Steinbeck's report on it? Well, in their own minds, they're apparently doing profoundly significant work, as they actually compare themselves to Darwin several times (which is especially annoying since, as noted above, they clearly don't even understand Darwin's thought). They do collect a lot of specimens, and make some observations about them, but, in accordance with their non-teleological thinking methods, it's mainly on the order of, sea cucumbers were the most numerous animal at collecting stations A, B, C, and D, and such and such species have a painful sting or pinch. It all seemed more detailed and systematic than would likely be of interest to the general reader, but not detailed and systematic enough to be of any real scientific value...so I'm really not sure who the audience for this book was supposed to be. In the end it's a sort of half-baked blend of bad philosophy, mediocre science, and uninspired travelogue. But apparently some people enjoy it, so what do I know (though I suspect that most of them would read anything with Steinbeck's name on it). But all this does at least shed some light on Steinbeck's fiction (beyond just the obvious fact that Doc in Cannery Row is clearly based on Ricketts), so it does at least have that value.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This was Steinbeck's only work of nonfiction and it is a doozzy. He and his lifelong best friend, Ed Ricketts (who was a marine biologist), chartered a boat, hired a crew and headed out to the California gulf to find and chart specimens from the waters there.While there is a lot in the book about hunting and finding specimens and how they handled them, there is so much in this book about how Steinbeck sees mankind and how we think, feel and why we react in certain circumstances the way that we do. Steinbeck was a very introspective man and his thoughts on all of this quite wowed me. I found it most fascinating. For instance, take the following; "Man is the only animal whose interest and whose drive are outside himself. Other animals may dig holes to live in; may weave nests or take possession of hollow trees. Some species, like bees or spiders, even create complicated homes, but they do it with the fluids and processes of their own bodies. They make little impression on the world. But the world is furrowed and cut, torn and blasted by man. Its flora has been swept away and changed; its mountains torn down by man; its flat lands littered by the debris of his living. And these changes have been wrought, not because any inherent technical ability has demanded them, but because his desire has created that technical ability. Physiological man does not require this paraphernalia to exist, but the whole man does. He is the only animal who lives outside of himself, whose drive is in external things--property, houses, money, concepts of power. He lives in his cities and his factories, in his business and job and art. But having projected himself into these external complexities, he is them. His house, his automobile are a part of him and a large part of him. This is beautifully demonstrated by a thing doctors know--that when a man loses his possessions a very common result is sexual impotence. If then the projection, the preoccupation of man, lies in external things so that even his subjectivity is a mirror of houses and cars and grain elevators, the place to look for his mutation would be in the direction of his drive, or in other words in the external things he deals with. And here we can indeed readily find evidence of mutation. The industrial revolution would then be indeed a true mutation, and the present tendency toward collectivism, whether attributed to Marx, or Hitler or Henry Ford, might be as definite a mutation of the species as the lengthening neck of the evolving giraffe. For it must be that mutations take place in the direction of a species drive or preoccupation. If then this tendency toward collectivization is mutation there is no reason to suppose it is for the better. It is a rule in paleontology that ornamentation and complication precede extinction. And our mutation, of which the assembly line, the collective farm, the mechanized army, and the mass production of food are evidences or even symptoms, might well correspond to the thickening armor of the great reptiles--a tendency than can end only in extinction. If this should happen to be true, nothing stemming from thought can interfere with it or bend it. Conscious thought seems to have little effect on the action or direction of our species."And that is just the tip of the iceberg.This was a relaxing read, excluding his remarks on mankind, which had my mind whirling. But relaxing in the way in which he narrates their six week expedition; the personalities of the crew members, in the way he speaks of them weighing anchor at villages and towns and how the townspeople related to them. He weaves a spell about the actual journey and how they all interacted with each other, the sunsets, the beauty and tranquility of the gulf, how they would enjoy talking over a beer at the end of the day and how once out there, they never wanted to come back, but upon their return they each rushed to return to their own lives.This is a very good book but one I think a person needs to take the time to reflect upon as they read it. I am so glad I took the time to read this book. It is quite different than anything of his that I have ever read and also beautiful in a very different way.The appendix of the book is totally about Ed Ricketts and is very, very interesting. I think Steinbeck cared greatly for this man. He died tragically and at a young age. It, the appendix, runs 50 pages long and could have been the makings of a book in and of itself. In it, I could see how the author patterned characters in his books after Ricketts; Doc, in Cannery Row especially. This one comes with high marks from me. And I think that even those who are not Steinbeck fans but enjoy nonfiction just might like this one.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Another great book from Steinbeck. My favorite part is the intro "About Ed Ricketts" - Steinbeck offers a great description of his friend Ed.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The abridged version of The Sea of Cortez. Steinbeck and biologist friend Ed Ricketts sail the Sea of Cortez studying flora, fauna, and themselves while philosophizing their travels away. Plates and appendices not included.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Tales of fabulous adventure and marine biology in a Gulf of California which surely doesn't exist any more. Steinbeck's wit and determination to enjoy life shine through this book. But this edition is also great for its appendix: "About Ed Ricketts". What a guy!