To Keep Catching Fish

In David Suzuki’s latest book — I say “latest” because even as a nonagenarian he remains a tireless firebrand — what struck me was the fish. Lessons from a Lifetime: 90 Years of Inspiration and Activism, written with Ian Hanington, is an unusual mash‑up: part coffee-table book, part memoir, part pre-obituary, for lack of a better word. At just under 200 pages, the relatively slim volume is chock full of photographs and testimonials from family, friends, and fellow warriors in the crusade to save the planet. It’s the third in a series of autobiographies. Metamorphosis: Stages in a Life came out in 1987, when Suzuki was fifty. A follow‑up, David Suzuki: The Autobiography, arrived in 2006. This most recent entry recycles much of that twenty-year-old material, chapter titles mostly intact — including the first and most direct: “My Happy Childhood in Racist British Columbia.” One would think there is nothing new to learn about the man. But as I pored...