In One Day at Teton Marsh, Sally Carrighar tells the story of a single day at a marsh in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, based on the hours she spent watching the various animals who call the Teton marshes home. It is through the perspectives of those animals--otter, trout, osprey, mosquito, scud, mink, hare, merganser, moose, leech, frog, snail, swan, and beaver--that the events of the day are told. Carrighar effortlessly weaves together the perspectives of these critters and, through her descriptions of the natural beauty of the marsh, brings it to life for the reader. A powerful tribute to the hidden complexities of the natural world, One Day at Teton Marsh is a must-read for nature lovers everywhere.
In "One Day at Teton Marsh," Sally Carrighar tells the story of a single day at a marsh in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, based on the hours she spent watching the various animals who call the Teton marshes home. It is through the perspectives of those animals--otter, trout, osprey, mosquito, scud, mink, hare, merganser, moose, leech, frog, snail, swan, and beaver--that the events of the day are told. Carrighar effortlessly weaves together the perspectives of these critters and, through her descriptions of the natural beauty of the marsh, brings it to life for the reader. A powerful tribute to the hidden complexities of the natural world, "One Day at Teton Marsh" is a must-read for nature lovers everywhere. Annotation Published: February 2014.
To Beetle Rock, in the High Sierra, the city folk come in summer to camp, to rest, and to look at the magnificent sky over their heads and the broad sweep of the valley 6,500 feet below them. But they see little of the life that lies about them in the bush and tress—the life, by turns tense, dramatic, playful, happy, hunger-driven, and danger-threatened, of the birds and animals to whom Beetle Rock is home. This is the life which Sally Carrighar opens to us in these singing pages. Writing with the skill of a first-rate novelist and with the accuracy and judgment of a first-rate naturalist, she shows us what happens to the whole animal community—more than fifty species—of the Rock during one typical day. It is June 18, high tide of the animals’ year. For those twenty-four hours we follow the hunts and foragings, the games and rests, the escapes and friendships of nine creatures: a weasel and her brood, a lizard, a jay, a deer mouse, a chickaree, a Sierra grouse, a coyote, a black bear and her cubs, and a mule deer. And through these nine we come to know all the others, all the vast interlocking complex of non-human life in a place where human visitors leave no lasting impression as they pass by. Rare indeed is work as fine as this—accurate in fact and in spirit, full of information and keen observation, yet genuinely beautiful and moving in its feeling for the outdoors. With this book, though it was her first, Sally Carrighar stepped into the foremost rank of American nature writers.
If, as many argue, movies and television have become Western culture's premier storytelling media, so too have they become, for most members of society, the primary source of encounters with the natural world—particularly wild animals. The television fare offered nightly by national and cable networks such as PBS and the Discovery Channel provides millions of viewers with their only experience of the wilderness and its inhabitants. The very films that so many viewers take as accurate portrayals of wildlife, however, have evolved primarily as a form of entertainment, following the established codes and conventions of narrative exposition. The result has been not the representation of nature, but its wholesale reconstruction and reconfiguration according to film and television conventions, audience expectations, and the demands of competition in the media marketplace. Wildlife Films traces the genealogy of the nature film, from its origins as the "animal locomotion" studies that mark the very beginnings of motion pictures themselves, to the founding of the Animal Planet cable channel that boasts "all animals, all the time." The narrative and thematic elements that unite wildlife films as a genre have their roots not in the documentary film tradition, but in the older traditions of oral and written animal fables as reflections of human society. Derek Bousé contends that classic wildlife films often portray animal protagonists living in families modeled on an ideal of the human nuclear family and working in communities that resemble an ideal of bucolic human society. In these stories—presented as documentaries—animals are motivated by human emotions and conduct relationships according to human customs. This imposition of culturally satisfying narrative patterns upon the lives of animals has not only led to the misrepresentation of the natural world; it has promoted the notion that our values, our moral vision, our models of society and family structure derive from nature, rather than being cultural formations.
Americans have had a long-standing love affair with the wilderness. As cities grew and frontiers disappeared, film emerged to feed an insatiable curiosity about wildlife. The camera promised to bring us into contact with the animal world, undetected and unarmed. Yet the camera's penetration of this world has inevitably brought human artifice and technology into the picture as well. In the first major analysis of American nature films in the twentieth century, Gregg Mitman shows how our cultural values, scientific needs, and new technologies produced the images that have shaped our contemporary view of wildlife. Like the museum and the zoo, the nature film sought to recreate the experience of unspoiled nature while appealing to a popular audience, through a blend of scientific research and commercial promotion, education and entertainment, authenticity and artifice. Travelogue-expedition films, like Teddy Roosevelt's African safari, catered to upper- and middle-class patrons who were intrigued by the exotic and entertained by the thrill of big-game hunting and collecting. The proliferation of nature movies and television shows in the 1950s, such as Disney's True-Life Adventures and Marlin Perkins's Wild Kingdom, made nature familiar and accessible to America's baby-boom generation, fostering the environmental activism of the latter part of the twentieth century. Reel Nature reveals the shifting conventions of nature films and their enormous impact on our perceptions of, and politics about, the environment. Whether crafted to elicit thrills or to educate audiences about the real-life drama of threatened wildlife, nature films then and now reveal much about the yearnings of Americans to be both close to nature and yet distinctly apart.
Literature-based activities designed to be used with five thematic sections covering plant and animal species, habitats, threats to the environment, natural phenomena, and technology.
With hundreds of interviews conducted over a 35-year span, this book is the most comprehensive history of television scoring to date. Music composed for television had, until recently, never been taken seriously by scholars or critics. Catchy TV themes, often for popular weekly series, were fondly remembered but not considered much more culturally significant than commercial jingles. Yet noted composers like John Williams, Henry Mancini, Jerry Goldsmith and Lalo Schifrin learned and/or honed their craft in television before going on to major success in feature films. Oscar-winning film composers like Bernard Herrmann, Franz Waxman and Maurice Jarre wrote hours of music for television projects, and such high-profile jazz figures as Duke Ellington, Dave Brubeck and Quincy Jones also contributed music to TV series. Concert-hall luminaries from Aaron Copland to Leonard Bernstein, and theater writers from Jerome Moross to Richard Rodgers, penned memorable scores for TV. Music for Prime Time is the first serious, journalistic history of music for American television. It is the product of 35 years of research and more than 450 interviews with composers, orchestrators, producers, editors and musicians active in the field. Based on, but vastly expanded and revised from, an earlier book by the same author, this wide-ranging narrative not only tells the backstory of every great TV theme but also examines the many neglected and frequently underrated orchestral and jazz compositions for television dating back to the late 1940s. Covering every series genre (crime, comedy, drama, westerns, action-adventure, fantasy and sci-fi), it also looks at music for animated series, news and documentary programming, TV-movies and miniseries, and how music for television has evolved in the era of cable and streaming options. It is the most comprehensive history of television scoring ever published.
