Publishers Weekly
★ 05/01/2023
Journalist Dickie debuts with a superb study of the eight surviving species of bears. Recounting her travels in search of spectacled bears in Ecuador and Peru, sloth bears in rural India, pandas in China, sun and moon bears in South Vietnam, black and grizzly bears in the western U.S., and polar bears in the Canadian arctic, Dickie details the threats faced by each and profiles the conservationists who protect them. Among the more heartwarming stories are those of a Chinese scientist nicknamed Papa Panda, who teaches captive pandas how to breed, and Chris Servheen, the biologist who spearheaded the effort to bring grizzly bears back from the brink of extinction in the U.S. Other dispatches are more somber, as when Dickie discusses how deforestation in Southeast Asia is threatening sloth bears’ long-term survival and describes the horrific conditions under which caged sun and moon bears have their bile harvested for use in traditional Vietnamese medicine. The searching accounts of threats faced by bears across the globe illuminate the struggles conservationists face, and the crisp prose will transport readers (“I glanced nervously toward the dark bay in the distance. The cobalt sky concealed the secrets of the muskeg,” Dickie writes about the time she was in Churchill, Canada, and suspected she was being stalked by a polar bear). It’s a winning combination of travel and environmental reporting. (July)
The New Yorker
"[A] timely survey."
Nature - Henry Nicholls
"An engaging travelogue…weaving together evolutionary biology, physiology, ecology, history, culture, economics, and politics to reveal the importance of each ursine species to our own."
Economist
"Eight Bears explores the wonder and friction that characterise the relationship between bruins and people.… [R]iveting and unique."
Nate Blakeslee
"Eight Bears is science journalism at its best: thoroughly researched, carefully conceived, and vividly written. Highly recommended!"
Washington Independent Review of Books - Gretchen Lida
"I found wonder, awe, melancholy, and terror woven amid stories of the creatures being chronicled.… [L]yrical."
Science - Özgün Emre Can
"[Gloria] Dickie’s detailed, accurate, and holistic view of human-bear relationships is impressive. Even bear researchers can fall short in this regard."
James Balog
"A definitive and magisterial account.… This book is essential reading about the ongoing Anthropocene collision between humanity and the rest of the natural world."
BookPage
"Laced with climate change warnings as [Gloria Dickie] explores all the ways humans both love and endanger these creatures."
Guardian - Edward Posnett
"A family album of the remaining varieties of bear…As Dickie shows, bears are in deep trouble, and her book is a compelling attempt to see through their eyes."
Science News - Jake Buehler
"A captivating and carefully considered mosaic of stories."
EcoLit Books - Bill Streever
"Wonderful…[O]ffers travel to Asia and South America, exchanges with purveyors of bear bile, quotes from ursine luminaries, and an engaging mix of science and experience."
Lyndsie Bourgon
"Written with deep compassion and striking humor, Eight Bears provides a deep and clarifying understanding of our history of ursine kinship."
Michael Kodas
"With deep, on-the-ground reporting and vivid writing, Gloria Dickie takes readers from the historic mythologies that have made bears the most charismatic of megafauna to the lairs and laboratories where the future for each of the world’s eight ursine species is being written. Her book is as magnificent as the animals we meet in it."
Ben Goldfarb
"At once heartbreaking and hopeful, steeped in science and rich in poetry, Eight Bears is an intrepid investigation into the harms we’ve inflicted upon bears—and proof that we still have the power to save our ursine brethren."
Michelle Nijhuis
"In this insightful, absorbing book, Gloria Dickie not only introduces us to the eight remaining species of bears themselves but deftly connects the plight of each species to a much larger story: the story of our ancient, fraught, irreplaceable relationship with these astonishing animals."
The Spectator (UK) - Katrina Gulliver
"This book is not just a bear encyclopedia. Dickie wants to ask what it means to conserve a species, and in some cases how much conservation is ‘enough.'"
Book Page
"Laced with climate change warnings as [Gloria Dickie] explores all the ways humans both love and endanger these creatures."
The Economist
"Eight Bears explores the wonder and friction that characterise the relationship between bruins and people…Gloria Dickie travels around the world, bringing readers on a riveting and unique sort of bear hunt."
Harley Rustad
"Gloria Dickie takes us on an intimate global journey into our tangled and absorbing relationship with bears, where fur brushes close to skin, where the stakes are high, and in which the future of bears is our future as well."
Wall Street Journal - Richard Adams Carey
"Vivid and engrossing…[Eight Bears] is not only a celebration of beardom, it is also, alas, a warning."
Kirkus Reviews
2023-03-22
A look at the world’s eight surviving bear species.
As Reuters global climate and environment correspondent Dickie notes, some of the world’s embattled bears are charismatic bywords for wild animals as a whole: the polar bear, say, or the grizzly. Others, such as the spectacled and sloth bears, are scarcely known. Yet all are slipping away save for the black bear, the sole species “considered secure throughout its global range,” and 6 of the 8 are under immediate threat of extinction—all due to human interventions in their environments. Their fortunes were not always so tenuous. As the author writes, modern bear lineages appeared over the last 5 million years or so, “extremely recently in terms of geological time,” and spread to every continent except Australia. Still, their day in the sun has been curtailed: There are perhaps 500 primate species, vastly outnumbering ursines. While many hunting cultures revered bears even as they feared them, urban civilizations have tended to discount them—and to kill in the course of encounters almost always initiated because humans are intruding into bear country. This sometimes happens in unexpected places. In North Gujarat, India, for example, sloth bear attacks on humans numbered 1 per year between 1960 and 1999, on average, while today the number has jumped to nine. The culprit? Lack of water in the hot summer months, when most attacks occur, caused by climate change. Climate change, of course, is devastating polar bears, who are becoming fewer and smaller, the result of a tightening food chain and loss of sea ice habitat, which “could disappear completely as early as 2035.” Dickie concludes by noting that the future is likely bleak. By 2100, she observes, the world’s human population is projected to reach 11 billion, and “every new human exacerbates the crises faced by the natural world.”
Gloomy in outlook but a cleareyed view of the world’s bears and the many threats they face.
