The View From Lazy Point is a lazy and hubristic book from a talented writer Carl Safina. If he had stayed on the northern tip of Long Island, New York, giving it his full attention and talent, he might have given a powerful lesson in what we can learn in our own small surrounding. Instead he leaves the island to give us gadfly tourist accounts of his fun trips to the Belize Barrier Reef, Bonaire, Southeast Alaska, Svalbard, Shishmaref, Kenai Peninsula, Islands of Palau, and the South Shetland Islands of the Antarctic Peninsula.
In addition to all this travel, he spends a great deal of energy complaining about everything that pisses him off politically, socially, culturally, environmentally, in world economy, well no aspect of life is missed. He morphs from naturalist to historian to economist to philosopher without ever getting in deep water. He must have learned that maneuver from all those shore birds who dodge the waves.
The maps by Jon Luoma were excellent, and the drawings by Trudy Nicholson were beautiful.
Don’t bother getting your feet wet with this one as you have read better; and surely in the future he will write better. Charles Marlin
