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Summary
Summary
This is the story of a life and spirit guided by the animals. Brenda Peterson was raised in the High Sierras on a national forest lookout station, and wildlife had a daily, defining influence on her life. Beginning with her fascination with Smokey Bear, Peterson explores her deep connection with animals, from watching grizzlies in Montana's Rockies, to keeping Siberian huskies as pets in New York City and Colorado, to her work for the restoration of wild wolves in the West. Her lively storytelling bridges the worlds of human and animal, as she fascinates us with intimate stories of the wild dolphins, whales, and orcas whose lives she has studied for the past two decades. With each moving story, Peterson reveals a turning point in which animal bonds have enriched her life and led her toward a wider epiphany: As a species we cannot live without other animals. 17 b/w photographs.
Author Notes
Brenda Peterson is the author of three novels, two collections of essays, and numerous articles. She lives in Seattle.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
A lifelong love of animals combined with a jeweler's eye for multifaceted philosophical meanings provide Peterson (Living by Water) with a wealth of fascinating anecdotes and insights in this engaging memoir. Moving easily back and forth in time and spaceÄfrom the Florida Keys and Rocky Mountains to the great Northwest and the canyons of New York CityÄPeterson defines her self, her joys and losses in part through the domestic and wild animals she meets and loves. The yarns about her own dogs and cats are no less intriguing than those about dolphins, wolves, bears and whales. In this easygoing narrative, Peterson also recounts experiences with other people at the nexus of their mutual interest in animals, including such mysterious moments as her encounter with a Navaho woman who, as if fulfilling a prophecy, presents the author with a power-laden necklace of wolves' teeth. Peterson's description of her mother's very different, more mundane attitude about the place of animals in the scale of things is affectionate, warm and humorous. The book is strongest in its clear portraits, which linger in the reader's mind. Its weakest aspect is the author's tendency to analyze and interpret her experiences in terms of syncretistic New Age truisms. Yet the latter is easily forgiven in this powerful vision about the essential importance of animals in the lives of human beings. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Memoirs of an ardent animal-rights activist who describes herself as having been carried all her life in the generous and instructive slipstream of other species. Peterson (Sister Stories, 1996, etc.) has spent her life keenly aware of the animals around her. Born in a US Forest Service lookout station in the High Sierras, she says her earliest memories are of the animal heads mounted on the cabin walls above her bed, and benign brushes with rattlesnakes and grizzly bears marked her youthwhile childish puzzlement over living conditions aboard Noahs ark and distress at seeing an aging bear held captive in a zoo later led her to serious questions about the proper relationship between humans to animals. For the author, the human-animal bond is an especially strong one: Animals, she insists, inspired my lifes work and my sense of the sacred. Her closeness to animals is illustrated by her accounts of how, at crucial points in her life, her pet dog (a huskie) and her cat (a Siamese Manx) comforted and nurtured her, restoring her balance. But it is wild animals that figure largest in Petersons memoirs: Her account of the acquisition of a wolf-tooth necklace that seems to her to have special powers is a bit over the top, but her eyewitness reports of a conference on wolf hunting in Alaska and the return of wolves to Yellowstone National Park are genuinely affecting. Her deepest feelings of kinship are for sea creatures, notably whales and dolphins, which she has been studying and working with for years. As she tells it, she and cetaceans are soulmates. A fervent plea, permeated by New Age spirituality, for recognition of the importance of animal life to the well-being of planet Earth.
Booklist Review
The memoir approach strikes gold in these upcoming animal books. Famed cinematographers Dereck and Beverly Joubert have spent more than 20 years in Botswana studying wildlife and making award-winning films (Eternal Enemies: Lions and Hyenas). In this new memoir, Dereck gives the reader an intimate look at what it takes to spend months in the field. After managing game lodges in South Africa for a few years, in 1981 the couple was given a chance to join a study of lions in Botswana, and they have never looked back. The text is interspersed with excerpts from their field journals, lending an air of immediacy to the remembrances, such as this observation about what to do when an overly heavy research vehicle keeps bogging down: "Today I cut the doors and roof off this truck with a cutting torch." The text is filled with the hardships and beauty of living in the bush; with the wonder of witnessing the birth of a baby elephant and the horror of the poaching of black rhinos; and with the insights into animal behavior that come from years of observation. This beautifully illustrated book is as close as most of us will ever get to living in the African wilds. Part memoir and part manifesto, Peterson presents the story of a life and spirit guided by animals. Born in the High Sierras to a Forest Service father and a Southern Baptist mother, Peterson was intimate with the forests and their animal denizens from an early age. Imbued with a spiritual background from her parents, the author finds meaning all around her. Animals seemed to give her direction at various turning points in her life, as the animals around her helped her to make life decisions. After returning home when fired from a job, the author was drifting with no direction, still under the sway of her father, until she saw a newborn foal stand and walk for the first time. This became her sign to stand on her own, impelling her to leave home. Similarly, animals guide her life and her writing as she works for wolf reintroduction in the West, writes of dolphins and whales in Hawaii, and of sea lions visiting her beach in Seattle. Unlike most of the other "guided by animals" New Age^-genre books it resembles, Build Me an Ark is based in science and is very well written to boot. "I had never planned to become a savanna baboon when I grew up; instead, I had always assumed I would become a mountain gorilla." Thus begins primatologist Sapolsky's reminiscences of 20 plus years studying baboons in Kenya. Originally intending to study the effects of stress on baboons, the author became enmeshed not only in the lives of his baboon subjects but in the social lives and politics of the people who live around his study area. Tales of darting baboons with anesthetic for physical examinations intertwine with stories of friendship with the local Masai village; visits from other field researchers (such as "Laurence of the Hyenas") intersperse with observing the overthrow of the baboon troop's alpha male while the author also deals with the post-colonial, bribery-ridden bureaucracy of Kenya. Humorous writing worthy of Gerald Durrell at his best mixes with hard-eyed descriptions of the reality of field work in a third-world country, and the good times and problems of the baboons tend to mirror those of their human neighbors. Sapolsky often wears his heart on his sleeve, and this emotional involvement combined with the scientific realities of the tales he tells makes for engrossing reading. --Nancy Bent
Library Journal Review
In this sentimental autobiography, Peterson (Living by Water) traces her evolution from nature writer to animal activist. She joins the Craigheads, Julia Butterfly Hill, Ed Abbey, and Barry Lopez in attempting to interpret the natural world and reshape public perception of nature and its relationship with human society. Along the way, Peterson touches on the grim results of wolf-control programs and the starvation of the orcas owing to overfishing and pollution, among other things. However, in her effort to demonstrate the interconnection of all living things, she fails to explore a single environmental issue in depth, instead focusing on her relationships with animals and her beliefs about them. Still, Peterson's point that a shift in public policy is critical to ensure the survival of the natural world and, ultimately, ourselves, is timely, and her romanticized portraits of animals help personalize these larger issues. No one can read Smoky the Bear's true story without feeling the national shame that accompanies it. Recommended for large public libraries, as well as natural history and environmental collections.DMary A. Stout, PIMA Community Coll. Downtown Campus Lib., Tucson (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Acknowledgments | p. 13 |
| Part 1 Animal Apprentice | |
| 1. Slipstream | p. 17 |
| 2. The Wild | p. 37 |
| 3. Grandmother, Grizzlies, and God | p. 51 |
| 4. Build Me an Ark | p. 61 |
| 5. The Real Smokey Bear | p. 73 |
| 6. Promised Land | p. 87 |
| 7. Domestic Happiness with Dogs | p. 101 |
| 8. Wolves in the Desert | p. 115 |
| Part 2 Return The Wild | |
| 9. Cats in the Rain Shadow | p. 137 |
| 10. An Afterlife of Animals | p. 161 |
| 11. Wolf Summits | p. 181 |
| 12. The Return | p. 197 |
| 13. Wolves in Our Backyard | p. 217 |
| Part 3 The World as an Ark | |
| 14. Spin of the Dolphin | p. 233 |
| 15. When Humpbacks Sing | p. 255 |
| 16. Lone, Sociable | p. 269 |
| 17. Silkie | p. 293 |
| 18. Animal Mundi | p. 303 |
| Help to Build a New Ark for the Animals | p. 315 |