Voice of the Wild: An Anthology of Animal Stories - Softcover

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9780140166392: Voice of the Wild: An Anthology of Animal Stories

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140166394 ISBN 13: 9780140166392

Publisher: Penguin Books, 1994

When the world was a wilder place, people wondered about animals the way they wondered about their neighbors...

Now there aren’t so many animals, nor occasions to encountered them. In The Voice of the Wild, Patricia Beard has collected the best of classic and contemporary fiction and nonfiction in which animals are at the heart of things. Unsentimental images capture the savageness as well as vulnerability of a myriad of species, while at the same time exposing Homo sapiens: an animal that while hunting its fellow creatures sometimes finds a kindred spirit, sometimes the archetypal enemy, but always sees in the wild a reflection of its own mysterious nature.

Stories by: Bartle Bull, Tim Cahill, Pat Conroy, Jim Corbett, Isak Dinesen, Alistair Graham, Elspeth Huxley, Rudyard Kipling, Jack London, Gavin Maxwell, Thomas McGuane, Thomas McNamee, Theodore Roosevelt, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Ernest Thompson Seton, Jean Stafford, Annabel Thomas, Laurens van der Post, and Henry Williamson

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From Publishers Weekly:

This curious collection of fiction and nonfiction about wild animals from a group of 19 talented writers gathers well-created, insightful prose from the best of sources and yet fails to shed light on the themes of wildness it promises to explore. Set on several continents--from Kipling's primeval India to the abundance of Isak Dinesen's Africa of abundance to the rugged American West of Tom McGuane--these stories most frequently chronicle the hunt, but also seek to tell of natural lessons learned by men of animals, by animals of men, and by both of themselves. Elephants, porcupines, grizzlies, antelope, porpoises and other species appear in these pieces. But Beard has excerpted nearly all of these selections from larger works, and in the process shorn away meaningful context and obscured the variety of perspectives she means to highlight. The narrow focus leads to monotony, and in spite of its evocative writing the anthology begins to read like a survey switching from one creature to the next. The brief, wistful excerpt from Saint-Exupery's The Little Prince seems egregiously abstract in this company. This is by no means an exhaustive gathering of wildlife writers--many good ones are excluded. Nor are these obscure, little-known works--several have been made into motion pictures, and most of the authors (Rudyard Kipling, Jack London, Elspeth Huxley, Gavin Maxwell, Ernest Thompson Seton) are widely read. Yet the insights here come only in the narrowest of glimmers.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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