Why Fish Don't Exist by Lulu Miller **** ( of 4)

David Starr Jordan was obsessed with making order from the chaos of nature. At the turn toward the 20th century, and importantly not so long after Charles Darwin's publication of The Origin of Species, Jordan set out to name and place within a taxonomic category every fish he could capture from planet earth. A wife and child died early in his life and yet he persevered with such fortitude and public success he rose to become President of Stanford University.

Adversity and chaos continue to track Jordan when among other calamities the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 destroyed thousands of his specimen jars, displacing archetypal samples from their floating labels in a shower of broken glass and formaldehyde. Within hours, Jordan was sewing labels to the gills of fish he could still identify, picking himself up and restarting his mission.

Lulu Miller, whose own life has been overtaken by chaos and disorder, finds herself obsessed with David Starr Jordan, hoping that in understanding how Jordan time and again rises above setbacks, she, too, will find the strength to conquer self-doubt and depression. What she finds instead is that the widely celebrated David Starr Jordan was not simply a fish collector. He harbored more than a little evil about which I cannot say more without spoiling Miller's exquisitely crafted tale of benefits and many of the costs that categorization and labeling has on human behaviors and outcomes. Taxonomy crossed with Darwinism in the hands of David Starr Jordan produced some awful outcomes. Imposing structure on the inevitability of entropy can help organize a life, but can also constrict it. Persistence is not the same as resilience. Life is complicated.