Book
Wild new world : the epic story of animals and people in America
Record details
- ISBN: 9781324065913
-
Physical Description:
434 pages : illustrations, maps ; 24 cm
print - Publisher: New York, NY : W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., [2023]
Content descriptions
| Bibliography, etc. Note: | Includes bibliographical references (pages 399-417) and index. |
| Formatted Contents Note: | Introduction: All is vanity -- A prologue in deep time -- Clovisia the beautiful -- Raven's and Coyote's America -- To know an entire heaven and an entire Earth -- Thou shalt acknowledge the wonder -- The natural West -- Silence and emptiness -- Last rivers across the sky -- Golden-eyed lightning rod -- A species of eternity -- Epilogue: How are you enjoying the anthropocene? |
Search for related items by subject
| Subject: | Animals -- North America Ethnozoology -- North America Human-animal relationships -- North America -- History |
Available copies
- 0 of 1 copy available at Selkirk College.
Holds
- 0 current holds with 1 total copy.
Show Only Available Copies
| Location | Call Number / Copy Notes | Barcode | Shelving Location | Circulation Modifier | Holdable? | Status | Due Date | Courses |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Castlegar Campus Library | QL 85 F59 2023 (Text) | B001708957 | New Books | Volume hold | Checked out | 2024-04-25 11:59pm |
- Booklist Reviews : Booklist Reviews 2022 October #1
*Starred Review* Award-winning historian Flores (Coyote America, 2016) has produced another terrific book about the wildlife of North America. Diving into deep time, his exploration begins in the Pleistocene epoch, during which newly arrived humans met the megafauna on their new terrain. Flores launches this blend of natural and human history with a discovery made by a Black cowboy in 1908: a mass of fossilized bison, one of which was later found to have a flint point embedded in its rib. Flores then tells the story of how carnivorous humans followed their prey out of Africa, arriving at last in the Western Hemisphere with its bountiful animal populations. What unfolds is a tale of wonder at what was and the pathos of extinction, both ancient and current. Flores writes beautifully of how geology shaped the landscape, of the impact of the spread of humans across the land during the Ice Age and the possibility that these early groups caused mass extinctions, of the new balance between humans and the rest of nature as Native Americans established nations north and south, and the violent changes and losses delivered by European colonizers and industrialization. Enlivened throughout with Flores' own adventures and many photographs, this is an outstanding and invaluable work of popular science. Copyright 2022 Booklist Reviews. - Kirkus Reviews : Kirkus Reviews 2022 September #2
A passionate history of North American animal life and people. Historian Flores, author of Coyote America, American Serengeti, and other acclaimed books on the American West, writes that when humans arrived in America 15,000 years ago, they found a vast continent teeming with unfamiliar creatures, including mammoths, mastodons, horses, bison, beavers, ground sloths, saber-toothed cats, and flightless birds. During the 20th century, scholars believed that, unlike modern man, early cultures lived in harmony with nature. Trying to explain why megafauna went extinct, they proposed climate change, disease, normal evolutionary processes, and even an asteroid strike. That they were wiped out by hunting is still considered controversial. Modern herd animals (bison, elk, deer) replaced them, and Native Americans thrived and took up agriculture as their populations got too large to survive by hunting alone. Contrary to many accounts, early travelers to Americaâincluding de Vaca, de Soto, Coronado, and othersâfound a populated land of cities and farms. After 1600, it was the British and French who encountered wilderness following a holocaust of European diseases, which killed 80% to 90% of Native peoples. With the human population devastated, wildlife flourished. Flores offers an illuminatingly disturbing history of the following 500 years. Disappointed at the absence of cities of gold, early colonists quickly discovered another source of profit, and a vast industry soon delivered an avalanche of animal body parts to Europe. In a single year, 1743, a modest port (La Rochelle, Louisiana) "took in 127,000 beaver pelts, 30,300 marten furs, 110,000 raccoon pelts, along with its big haul for that year, the stripped skins of 16,500 American black bears." The author makes it abundantly clear that money "trumped any philosophical debate elites might be having about humanity's animal origins." Readers will squirm at the vivid accounts of the fates of many species, but they will be heartened by the stories of men and women who devoted themselves to saving them and sometimes succeeded. An outstanding addition to the literature on the ecological history of America. Copyright Kirkus 2022 Kirkus/BPI Communications. All rights reserved. - Library Journal Reviews : LJ Reviews 2022 May
A distinguished scholar of the U.S. West, Flores (
Copyright 2022 Library Journal.Coyote America ) surveys human-wildlife interactions across North America, from the emergence of its flora and fauna and the Pleistocene mass extinctions to the impact of white settlement and the decline (and sometimes rescue) of species in recent centuries.
