Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight meets Mean Girls in this funny, insightful fish-out-of-water memoir about a young girl coming of age half in a "baboon camp" in Botswana, half in a ritzy Philadelphia suburb. Keena Roberts split her adolescence between the wilds of an island camp in Botswana and the even more treacherous halls of an elite Philadelphia private school. In Africa, she slept in a tent, cooked over a campfire, and lived each day alongside the baboon colony her parents were studying. She could wield a spear as easily as a pencil, and it wasn't unusual to be chased by lions or elephants on any given day. But for the months of the year when her family lived in the United States, this brave kid from the bush was cowed by the far more treacherous landscape of the preppy, private school social hierarchy. Most girls Keena's age didn't spend their days changing truck tires, baking their own bread, or running from elephants as they tried to do their schoolwork. They also didn't carve bird whistles from palm nuts or nearly knock themselves unconscious trying to make homemade palm wine. But Keena's parents were famous primatologists who shuttled her and her sister between Philadelphia and Botswana every six months. Dreamer, reader, and adventurer, she was always far more comfortable avoiding lions and hippopotamuses than she was dealing with spoiled middle-school field hockey players. In Keena's funny, tender memoir, Wild Life, Africa bleeds into America and vice versa, each culture amplifying the other. By turns heartbreaking and hilarious, Wild Life is ultimately the story of a daring but sensitive young girl desperately trying to figure out if there's any place where she truly fits in.
Erik is preparing for his first-ever hunting trip when he learns that his parents are being deployed to Iraq. A few days later, Erik is shipped off to North Dakota to live with Big Darrell and Oma, grandparents he barely knows. When Erik rescues a dog that's been stuck by a porcupine, Big Darrell says Erik can't keep him. But Erik has already named her Quill and can't bear to give her up. He decides to run away, taking the dog and a shotgun, certain that they can make it on their own out on the prairie. In this story of adventure and survival, Erik learns about the challenges and satisfactions of living off the land, the power of family secrets, and the pain of losing what you love.
Michael 'Nick' Nichols has for decades created powerful and eloquent images of iconic wildlife species. His vision is to stir the emotions of viewers leading to empathy and conservation. Melissa Harris has provided a sparkling text not just of Nick and his colleagues at work in the field, but one which provides many fascinating insights into the conservation issues related to his photographic quests. Among these are the survival of mountain gorillas during nearly six decades of civil war in their realm, the horrendous elephant slaughter for ivory, and the ethics of trophy hunting, of killing lions for pleasure. This is an illuminating and honest book about some of the world's greatest natural treasures and those who strive to protect them.--George B. Schaller, author of The Serengeti Lion and The Year of the Gorilla A Wild Life is Nichols's story, told with passion and insight by author and photo-editor Melissa Harris. Nichols' story combines a life of adventure, with a conviction about how we can redeem the human race by protecting our wildlife. The book's two central characters are the photographer--who journeys from the American South, via the photographers' co-operative Magnum, to becoming lead wildlife photographer of National Geographic magazine--and the author, who travels with the photographer on assignment in Africa, to gain intimate and deep insight into her subject. Harris's story also draws on meetings with some of the world's leading eco-scientists--including legendary primatologist, Jane Goodall.
Experience the thrilling adventures in wildlife conservation from "the Indiana Jones of Biology" (Entrepreneur) in this action-packed and educational memoir filled with danger and intrigue. Very few individuals can truthfully say that their work impacts every person on earth. Forrest Galante is one of them. As a wildlife biologist and conservationist, Galante devotes his life to studying, rediscovering, and protecting our planet’s amazing lifeforms. Part memoir, part biological adventure, Still Alive celebrates the beauty and determined resiliency of our world, as well as the brave conservationists fighting to save it. In his debut book, Galante takes readers on an exhilarating journey to the most remote and dangerous corners of the world. He recounts miraculous rediscoveries of species that were thought to be extinct and invites readers into his wild life: from his upbringing amidst civil unrest in Zimbabwe to his many globetrotting adventures, including suspenseful run-ins with drug cartels, witch doctors, and vengeful government officials. He shares all of the life-threatening bites, fights, falls, and jungle illnesses. He also investigates the connection between wildlife mistreatment and human safety, particularly in relation to COVID-19. Still Alive is much more than just a can’t-put-down adventure story bursting with man-eating crocodiles, long-forgotten species rediscovered, and near-death experiences. It is an impassioned, informative, and undeniably inspiring examination of the importance of wildlife conservation today and how every individual can make a difference.
". . . Facts, conservation success stories, and profiles of people working hard to find and protect the rarest of . . . species"--Provided by publisher.
Terrific, amusing, poignant account of 25 years in Zimbabwe as a wildlife conservationist, saving Rhinos and cheetahs, mapping out elephant corridors, and flying over wilderness to track animals.
This classic history of the rare, threatened, and extinct animals of North America is a dramatic chronicle of man's role in the disappearance of great and small species of our land. "Should be the number one source volume for everyone who embraces the philosophy of conservation".--Roger Tory Peterson. Illustrations throughout.
"The Wyoming Centennial Wagon Train ended in Cody in a dismal, torn-down drive-in movie theater. Before setting up the corral, we were forced to clear away shards of glass, bent nails, broken lumber. My prairie skirt and petticoats hung ragged and clay-caked, and under a droopy Stetson my frizzled hair appeared at once greased and starched beyond human recognition. A cloud, a sort of vaporousness, redolent with fresh acrid sweat on top of powerful stale sweat, hung thickly about me. Laced, as it was, with a woman's sweet musky secretions, and all gone past ripe, oddly it was a pungency I savored. Such goaty piquance, though, was cause to be shunned in any town setting. The look of my world had changed. Gone were the high-dollar designer clothes and the zipping around fabled Marin County in a candy-apple-red 1966 Mustang convertible. It was true that I unfailingly sought the ironies in life and, with a kind of dual personality, shifted easily through incongruencies such as town strolls in high heels and backcountry hiking in bare feet; the bucket seats of a classic automobile and the broken-down bench of a beater truck. It was only during the years that Iíd worn white overalls, taped drywall, and come home every night much like Charles Schulz's Pig Pen, flaking a cloud of dried white mud bits onto the rug, that I'd felt moved to keep my fingernails painted red. Now I was to slip farther than ever planned toward one end of my seesaw and then, incredibly, by conscious design, inch out even farther." --from Barefoot-Hearted With more than 1.5 million copies in print, Kathleen Meyer's groundbreaking international bestseller, How to Shit in the Woods: An Environmentally Sound Approach to a Lost Art, has been widely embraced by the outdoor community and has found its way into myriad places: national parks, outdoor leadership schools and scout-troop headquarters, the camp tents of those who have discovered that it is amusing out-loud reading, and the bathroom-literature baskets of households around the world. Now, from the Rocky Mountain West, Meyer brings us Barefoot-Hearted: A Wild Life Among Wildlife, a coming-into-the-country story told with the frank, dry humor and sharp research of her first book. The country, in this case, is Montana's tall, reaching landscape with its ever underfoot wild critters; the on-tenterhooks territory of a new romantic relationship; and the pressure cooker that is our precarious global imbalance. Meyer finds herself in midlife standing out under yawning skies, surrounded by sagebrush and cactus, having fallen for the Irish charm of itinerant farrier Patrick McCarron. As partners, they travel across three mountain states with draft horses and a covered wagon and then set up housekeeping in a seventy-five-year-old dairy barn. In this primitive structure, the author rapidly discovers she's living with troops of mice, a nursery colony of seventy-five bats, sexually fired-up skunks, and more flies than in a pig shed. She tells of a freakish season that or-phaned seventy-seven bear cubs, an unusual fly-fishing trip on a famed blue-ribbon trout stream, the visitations of moose, and the discovery of a den of wolves. Meyer's prose is original and inspired, playful yet provocative. She carries us vividly back to the settlers' old West while pondering modern-day dilemmas, those of fitting into this fast hurtling world, of determining amid the earth's rising extinctions of species, whose planet it is, and of managing to stay empowered residing with a man who "stands six feet six and beats steel on an anvil for a living." A personal chronicle of conscience and a love story of rare and quirky dimension, Barefoot-Hearted catapults readers into new realms of thought, deftly guided there by Meyer's sense of the ironic, the randy, and the humorous.
