The Animal Dialogues: Uncommon Encounters in the Wild

by Craig Childs Narrated by Craig Childs

Overview

From one of the finest nature writers at work in America today-a lyrical, dramatic, illuminating tour of the hidden domain of wild animals.

Whether recalling the experience of being chased through the Grand Canyon by a bighorn sheep, swimming with sharks off the coast of British Columbia, watching a peregrine falcon perform acrobatic stunts at 200 miles per hour, or engaging in a tense face-off with a mountain lion near a desert waterhole, Craig Childs captures the moment so vividly that he puts the reader in his boots.

Each of the forty brief, compelling narratives in The Animal Dialogs focuses on the author's own encounter with a particular species and is replete with astonishing facts about the species' behavior, habitat, breeding, and lifespan. But the glory of each essay lies in Childs's ability to portray the sometimes brutal beauty of the wilderness, to capture the individual essence of wild creatures, to transport the reader beyond the human realm and deep inside the animal kingdom

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

In these eloquent essays, naturalist and adventurer Childs (House of Rain) describes some of his extraordinary experiences with creatures-from wasps, red-spotted toads and hummingbirds to grizzly bears, coyotes and jaguars. Seeking entrée into animal societies, he interprets messages left in marks on the ground and in scents on leaves and trees, and communicates with animals directly using their own language of stares, gestures, postures, sounds, scents and gaits. He goes looking for animals alone in hazardous wilderness areas-tracking mountain goats in Colorado's Gore Range or surprising a secret society of ravens in a canyon in Utah. Always longing to be at one with animals, he is not afraid to climb an aspen to see the world from a porcupine's perspective, run with a herd of elk or wonder how it would feel to jump from a plane and fly with a bald eagle. Childs's captivating essays, rich in sensuous imagery (the porcupine "looks like a mop, a bundle of ponderosa pine needles, a mobile hairstyle"), are hauntingly beautiful and replete with evocative observations of animal life. 42 b&w illus. (Dec. 12)

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Kirkus Reviews

Naturalist and essayist Childs (House of Rain: Tracking a Vanished Civilization Across the American Southwest, 2007, etc.) celebrates wild creatures met in wild places. The author has a talent for bringing his encounters home and fashioning them into chromatic, immediate accounts. Some of the experiences chronicled here are quite simply breath-catching and heart-gladdening: following an intermittent stream of ruby-red dragonflies to a water source in a dry land; watching 50 violet-green swallows "working a cat's cradle into the air"; placing a mouse upon a branch to become a canape for a northern spotted owl. Occasionally-and profoundly, as the pursuer becomes the pursued-Childs is reminded that his place on the food chain is not necessarily at the apex. Surprise, a mountain lion! "It moves out from under the shadows so that both of us are in the same sunlight . . . It begins walking straight at me." Jeopardy doesn't have to come from something big or venomous, however; a raccoon that doesn't appreciate Child's efforts to rescue him becomes a 12-pound package of fury, snapping jaws. Only rarely does the author's inventiveness fail him: A black bear is the "dark prince of the mountains," and we must read about him "letting out a steaming arc" as he urinates into the cold morning air. As in his 1997 collection Crossing Paths, from which a few pieces are reprinted, Childs's great accomplishment is to excite our thrill in an animal's beauty and strangeness, then arouse our protective instincts by pointing out its vulnerability. Each of these pieces is a personal invitation to get outdoors and celebrate all things furred, feathered and scaled.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170236275
Publisher:	Hachette Audio
Publication date:	01/15/2019
Edition description:	Unabridged

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