God Is an Octopus by Ben Goldsmith review – the consolations of nature | Science and nature books
Ben Goldsmith’s remarkable memoir begins with his daughter, Iris, swimming into the sea to place her hands on the carcass of a humpback whale, captured by whalers off the island of Bequia in the Caribbean. The powerful image of the “teenage girl in the blood-red water unafraid, tenderly handling the dead monster” illustrates Iris’s reverence for the natural world as well as being a portent of tragedy.In 2019, the gentle rhythm of a normal summer’s day was shattered by Iris’s death in an accident on the family farm in…