Review by Booklist Review
In an evocative series of essays, Childs writes of moments of connection between animal and human: hiking a desert canyon, descending by hand- and foot-holds, and almost stepping on a mountain lion, or finding a raccoon trapped in a desert pool and the epic battle that ensued when Childs rescued it. Sleeping in a tepee with opened flaps and being awakened by the breeze from a hovering hummingbird's wings. Or a praying mantis that crashed a picnic, observing Childs with its bulbous gaze. In lyrical language, Childs places the reader in the moment, and we feel the power of a spotted owl catching a mouse, the drama of an elk herd crashing through the snow, or the swaying of trees in the wind as Childs climbs with a porcupine. A book for dipping into during quiet moments, Childs' essays will teach all comers how to get inside the moment and touch the animals with which we share our planet.--Bent, Nancy Copyright 2007 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In these eloquent essays, naturalist and adventurer Childs (House of Rain) describes some of his extraordinary experiences with creatures-from wasps, red-spotted toads and hummingbirds to grizzly bears, coyotes and jaguars. Seeking entree into animal societies, he interprets messages left in marks on the ground and in scents on leaves and trees, and communicates with animals directly using their own language of stares, gestures, postures, sounds, scents and gaits. He goes looking for animals alone in hazardous wilderness areas-tracking mountain goats in Colorado's Gore Range or surprising a secret society of ravens in a canyon in Utah. Always longing to be at one with animals, he is not afraid to climb an aspen to see the world from a porcupine's perspective, run with a herd of elk or wonder how it would feel to jump from a plane and fly with a bald eagle. Childs's captivating essays, rich in sensuous imagery (the porcupine "looks like a mop, a bundle of ponderosa pine needles, a mobile hairstyle"), are hauntingly beautiful and replete with evocative observations of animal life. 42 b&w illus. (Dec. 12) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
In 13 original essays, naturalist Childs-often heard on NPR's Morning Edition-has us trotting with bighorn sheep, swimming with sharks, and flying high with falcons. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Naturalist and essayist Childs (House of Rain: Tracking a Vanished Civilization Across the American Southwest, 2007, etc.) celebrates wild creatures met in wild places. The author has a talent for bringing his encounters home and fashioning them into chromatic, immediate accounts. Some of the experiences chronicled here are quite simply breath-catching and heart-gladdening: following an intermittent stream of ruby-red dragonflies to a water source in a dry land; watching 50 violet-green swallows "working a cat's cradle into the air"; placing a mouse upon a branch to become a canap for a northern spotted owl. Occasionally--and profoundly, as the pursuer becomes the pursued--Childs is reminded that his place on the food chain is not necessarily at the apex. Surprise, a mountain lion! "It moves out from under the shadows so that both of us are in the same sunlight...It begins walking straight at me." Jeopardy doesn't have to come from something big or venomous, however; a raccoon that doesn't appreciate Child's efforts to rescue him becomes a 12-pound package of fury, snapping jaws. Only rarely does the author's inventiveness fail him: A black bear is the "dark prince of the mountains," and we must read about him "letting out a steaming arc" as he urinates into the cold morning air. As in his 1997 collection Crossing Paths, from which a few pieces are reprinted, Childs's great accomplishment is to excite our thrill in an animal's beauty and strangeness, then arouse our protective instincts by pointing out its vulnerability. Each of these pieces is a personal invitation to get outdoors and celebrate all things furred, feathered and scaled. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
