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.
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
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
The Animal Dialogues: Uncommon Encounters in the Wild
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
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
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The Animal Dialogues: Uncommon Encounters in the Wild
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Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940170236275 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Hachette Audio |
| Publication date: | 01/15/2019 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
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