Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story

Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America

A New York Times Notable Book of 2013

"Ambitious and fascinating... [Mooallem] seamlessly blends reportage from the front lines of wildlife conservation with a lively cultural history of animals in America... This is not a book about wilderness; itâ€™s a book about us." --New York Times Book Review

Journalist Jon Mooallem has watched his little daughterâ€™s world overflow with animals butterfly pajamas, appliquÃ©d owlsâ€”while the actual world sheâ€™s inheriting slides into a great storm of extinction. Half of all species could disappear by the end of the century, and scientists now concede that most of Americaâ€™s endangered animals will survive only if conservationists keep rigging the world around them in their favor. So Mooallem ventures into the field, often taking his daughter with him, to move beyond childlike fascination and make those creatures feel more real. Wild Ones is a tour through our environmental moment and the eccentric cultural history of people and wild animals in America that inflects itâ€”from Thomas Jeffersonâ€™s celebrations of early abundance to the turn-of the-last-century origins of the teddy bear to the whale-loving hippies of the 1970s. In America, Wild Ones discovers, wildlife has always inhabited the terrain of our imagination as much as the actual land.

The journey is framed by the stories of three modern-day endangered species: the polar bear, victimized by climate change and ogled by tourists outside a remote northern town; the little-known Langeâ€™s metalmark butterfly, foundering on a shred of industrialized land near San Francisco; and the whooping crane as itâ€™s led on a months-long migration by costumed men in ultralight airplanes. The wilderness that Wild Ones navigates is a scrappy, disorderly place where amateur conservationists do grueling, sometimes preposterous-looking work; where a marketer maneuvers to control the polar bearâ€™s image while Martha Stewart turns up to film those beasts for her show on the Hallmark Channel. Our most comforting ideas about nature unravel. In their place, Mooallem forges a new and affirming vision of the human animal and the wild ones as kindred creatures on an imperfect planet.

With propulsive curiosity and searing wit, and without the easy moralizing and nature worship of environmental journalismâ€™s older guard, Wild Ones merges reportage, science, and history into a humane and endearing meditation on what it means to live in, and bring a life into, a broken world.

--And donâ€™t miss the album based on the book: WILD ONES by Black Prairie--

Country	USA
Author	Jon Mooallem
Binding	Hardcover
EAN	9781594204425
Edition	0
ISBN	159420442X
Label	Penguin Press
Manufacturer	Penguin Press
NumberOfItems	1
NumberOfPages	352
PublicationDate	2013-05-16
Publisher	Penguin Press
ReleaseDate	2013-05-16
Studio	Penguin Press

Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America

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