Timothy, or, Notes of an abject reptile /

Gilbert White, an eighteenth-century English curate and author of the long-cherished Natural History of Selborne, described the tortoise who lived in his garden as the most abject reptile and torpid of beings. Said reptile begs to differ in this wry rebuttal. Klinkenborg, whose celebrated books include The Rural Life (2002), outdoes himself as he conveys the contemplative pace, wisdom, and wit of a reptile keenly attuned to the ironies of human existence. What White views as torpor, Timothy experiences as the serenity of a perfectly adapted, self-contained creature, unlike humans, who struggle to create everything from shelter to comforting visions of an afterlife. Captured on the coast of Turkey in 1740 and sold to White's uncle by a drunken sailor, Timothy, now 81, has grown weary of the fuss and self-regard of humans. How, the tortoise asks, can these vulnerable bipeds, creatures dependent on and outnumbered by so many other life-forms, believe that only they constitute the family of god ? And what sort of naturalist is White when he doesn't even realize that Timothy is female? Klinkenborg's tortoise's-eye view of human striving is hilarious and revealing, his trans-species empathy striking, and his perception of the interconnectedness of life sublime. --Donna Seaman Copyright 2006 Booklist

In a gorgeous hybrid of naturalist observation, novelistic invention and philosophical meditation, Klinkenborg, a member of the New York Times editorial board and chronicler of the rural life (Making Hay), views the English countryside through the eyes of a tortoise and gives his human readers rich food for thought. For 13 years, Timothy the tortoise lived amid the bounty of 18th-century curate and amateur naturalist Gilbert White's garden. White, author of A Natural History of Selbourne, had inherited the reptile from his aunt, who had kept her (Timothy was a female, "stolen from the [Mediterranean] ruins I was basking on" and brought to "cold, manicured" England) for thrice as long. Timothy, as Klinkenborg imagines her, is melancholic, wise, resigned; her patient narration reveals extraordinary powers of observation and empathy: "the Hampshire sky staggers me now with loveliness. Creeping fogs in the pastures. Gossamer on the stubbles. The parish rings with light. Whole being of the world distilled into a moment." The only plot is the passage of time, and Timothy's scrutiny of life around her: humans are "great soft tottering beasts" who, blinded by their humanness, believe that "the language of the brute creation is no language at all." This "true story," as Klinkenborg describes it, offers studied, beautiful reflections on the present and memory, earth and weather, love and utility, human and beast. This is a wholly unexpected and astonishing book. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

It's billed as fiction in the catalog, but evidently the author and editor are making every effort to position this book as natural history. Timothy, a tortoise whose comings and goings were carefully observed by 18th-century English curate Gilbert White, is given full voice by Klinkenborg of the New York Times editorial board. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

A dazzling riff on human beings and their weird ways "written" by an 18th-century tortoise that lived for years in the garden of English naturalist/curate Gilbert White and appeared in White's The Natural History of Selborne (1789). The shell of the actual Timothy now resides in a London museum and once covered a female, not a male (as White had mistakenly concluded). The Timothy that Klinkenborg (The Rural Life, 2002, etc.), a member of the editorial board of the New York Times, imagines is a fascinating creature with a brisk prose style (many short, sharp sentences and fragments) and significant observations about how we humans look, act and think. Timothy is troubled by the determination of the English to manicure and control the countryside (his single "escape" is prompted by his desire to find a place where he can "live in the ancient disorder of nature again"). He ponders our insistence on classifying the natural world, and he is puzzled by our gait, our failure to recognize that we are animals, our short lives, our burial practices, our clothing, our religion and our sex acts. On virtually every page is a phrase or sentence that entertains or amuses or informs. ("A tortoise," he says, "lives even longer than a bishop.") Timothy recognizes that we are a dangerous species: "The worst of their character," he says of us, "so often prevails." He expatiates upon chelonian sex and observes that reptiles present "no pretense of fidelity" the way humans do. He wonders about war, about our belief that the world exists for our use alone, about our fear of death--and our fear of life. Timothy the tortoise is a splendid social critic, a keen-eyed anthropologist who sees far beyond his shell. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.