Harriet Ryegate, the proper daughter of Massachusetts Puritans, is the first white woman to go far into the wilderness beyond the upper Missouri. With her husband, a Baptist minister, she seeks to convert the Blackfoot Indians to Christianity. But it is the Ryegates who are changed by their "journey into strangeness." Marcus Ryegate returns to Massachusetts obsessed by a beautiful Indian woman. For sermonizing about her, he pays a heavy price. ΓΈ Harriet, one of Mildred Walker?s most fully realized characters, writes in her journal about "the effect of the Wilderness on civilized persons who are accustomed to live in the world of words." If a Lion Could Talk reveals the tragic lack of communication that stretches from Massachusetts to Missouri and beyond in the years before the Civil War?and the appalling heart of darkness that is close to home.
The study of animal intelligence has developed enormously over the last decade. Herons fish' using twigs as bait, monkeys add and subtract, dolphins hunt in groups to outwit prey, ravens solve complex puzzles. Steering clear of sentimental attempts to equate animals with humans, Stephen Budiansky shows us how superbly well-adapted animal intelligence' is for the survival of animals - large and small, wild and domestic - in the evolutionary contest. We can thus learn a true respect for their remarkable evolutionary heritage on Earth.
Master science writer Stephen Budiansky takes us inside the startling world of animal behavior and finds that we are not the smartest animals on Earth.
"And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth." --Genesis 1:24-26 In this crucial passage from the Old Testament, God grants mankind power over animals. But with this privilege comes the grave responsibility to respect life, to treat animals with simple dignity and compassion. Somewhere along the way, something has gone wrong. In Dominion, we witness the annual convention of Safari Club International, an organization whose wealthier members will pay up to $20,000 to hunt an elephant, a lion or another animal, either abroad or in American "safari ranches," where the animals are fenced in pens. We attend the annual International Whaling Commission conference, where the skewed politics of the whaling industry come to light, and the focus is on developing more lethal, but not more merciful, methods of harvesting "living marine resources." And we visit a gargantuan American "factory farm," where animals are treated as mere product and raised in conditions of mass confinement, bred for passivity and bulk, inseminated and fed with machines, kept in tightly confined stalls for the entirety of their lives, and slaughtered in a way that maximizes profits and minimizes decency. Throughout Dominion, Scully counters the hypocritical arguments that attempt to excuse animal abuse: from those who argue that the Bible's message permits mankind to use animals as it pleases, to the hunter's argument that through hunting animal populations are controlled, to the popular and "scientifically proven" notions that animals cannot feel pain, experience no emotions, and are not conscious of their own lives. The result is eye opening, painful and infuriating, insightful and rewarding. Dominion is a plea for human benevolence and mercy, a scathing attack on those who would dismiss animal activists as mere sentimentalists, and a demand for reform from the government down to the individual. Matthew Scully has created a groundbreaking work, a book of lasting power and importance for all of us.
Bristling with intelligence and shimmering with romance, this novel tests the boundary between history and myth. Patrick Lewis arrives in Toronto in the 1920s and earns his living searching for a vanished millionaire and tunneling beneath Lake Ontario. In the course of his adventures, Patrick's life intersects with those of characters who reappear in Ondaatje's Booker Prize-winning The English Patient. 256 pp.
An English professor at North Carolina State University, the author spent a sabbatical as a hands-on volunteer, working with lions, leopards, and other wild creatures at Harnas Wildlife Foundation in Namibia. This title is based on her incredible experiences there.
The centenary of the birth of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) provided an opportunity for recovering some of the great Wittgensteinian subjects, for re-examining them and for discussing their implications and relevance. This volume is the result of the interchange that took place in Girona (Spain) among well-known scholars of Wittgenstein's work in different countries. The eleven contributions are organized into three main subjects: on Wittgenstein's method (B. McGuinness, E. Tugendhat and J.M. Terricabras), on knowledge and meaning (G.E.M. Anscombe, R. Bambrough, N. Malcolm, and P.T. Geach), on language and use (D. Pears, E.v. Savigny, J. Bouveresse and J. Ferrater Mora). This volume is not only the result of the different and mature reflexions of its authors, but in two cases (Malcolm and Ferrater Mora) it has also unfortunately become their last contribution to the subject.
