The second part of the subtitle: '.the Art of Growing a Backbone.' might as well not have been included as Berwald only addresses how she is now willing to speak out about the affect of climate change on the ocean and why that is important in the last 5-10 pages. It actually made me wonder if this was self-published.Ģ. This book needed to go through another round of editing as there were several easily identifiable grammatical errors that really should have been fixed before publication. Part science/part memoir, a person who does not normally read science topics or who knows nothing about jellyfish will find the writing easy to understand and quite fascinating at times.ġ. Positives: Spineless is written in a very approachable manner and is easy to understand. ☆ Overall, it comes across as a bland but breezy read with some nice jellyfish science thrown in. (The question was 'Will jellyfish be the big winners after global warming and ocean acidification?') A refocusing might have been helpful. ☆ This is not so much a flaw, but the science doesn't actually answer the question she set out to address. A look at The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History would have served her very well, and I think if she had entered into some dialog with that book she might have had some interesting contributions to make. ☆ The author also fails to do any actual journalism around the 'Save the oceans!' theme she seems to be trying to go after. ☆ The author spends far too much time navel gazing her own struggle to find meaning as a fairly privileged middle aged woman just doesn't relate all that much to the jellyfish. ☆ There isn't nearly as much jellyfish science in here as I was expecting. ★ It is actually more coherent than The Soul of an Octopus, although I'm not sure more coherent comes out to better in this case. Berwald does manage to meet some interesting people during her jellyfish obsession, including the woman who found the kraken and a woman who swims from Cuba to Miami. ★ There is some nice jellyfish science in here. I had a review typed up and the wi-fi crash at the library ate it, and I don't really feel like messing with this much more, so I'm going to go with pros and cons and be done with it.

In spite of all my anxiety about buying, soaking, preparing, and then eating it, jellyfish was completely unremarkable.

The taste of the jellyfish was so subtle as to be almost nothing at all.

Spineless juli berwald