AccueilGroupesDiscussionsPlusTendances
Site de recherche
Ce site utilise des cookies pour fournir nos services, optimiser les performances, pour les analyses, et (si vous n'êtes pas connecté) pour les publicités. En utilisant Librarything, vous reconnaissez avoir lu et compris nos conditions générales d'utilisation et de services. Votre utilisation du site et de ses services vaut acceptation de ces conditions et termes.

Résultats trouvés sur Google Books

Cliquer sur une vignette pour aller sur Google Books.

Chargement...

Of Wolves and Men by Lopez, Barry (1979) Paperback (1978)

par Barry Holstun Lopez

MembresCritiquesPopularitéÉvaluation moyenneMentions
8561125,074 (4.25)41
Originally Published in 1978, this special twenty-fifth-anniversary edition of the National Book Award finalist includes an entirely new afterword in which the author considers the current state of knowledge about wolves and recent efforts to rein-troduce wolves to their former habitats in American wilderness areas. Humankind's relationship with the wolf is based on a spectrum of responses running from fear to admiration and affection. Lopez's classic, careful study won praise from a wide range of reviewers and went on to improve the way books about wild animals are written. Of Wolves and Men reveals the uneasy interaction between wolves and civilization over the centuries, and the wolf's prominence in our thoughts about wild creatures. Drawing on an astonishing array of literature, history, science, and mythology as well as considerable personal experience with captive and free-ranging wolves, Lopez argues for the necessity of the wolf's preservation and envelops the reader in its sensory world, creating a compelling picture of the wolf both as real animal and as imagined by man. A scientist might perceive the wolf as defined by research data, while an Eskimo hunter sees a family provider much like himself. For many Native Americans the wolf is also a spiritual symbol, a respected animal that can make both the individual and the community stronger. With irresistible charm and elegance, Of Wolves and Men celebrates scientific fieldwork, dispels folklore that has enabled the Western mind to demonize wolves, explains myths, and honors indigenous traditions, allowing us to further understand how this incredible animal has come to live so strongly in the human heart.… (plus d'informations)
Chargement...

Inscrivez-vous à LibraryThing pour découvrir si vous aimerez ce livre

Actuellement, il n'y a pas de discussions au sujet de ce livre.

» Voir aussi les 41 mentions

Affichage de 1-5 de 11 (suivant | tout afficher)
A deep dive into the history, mythology, biology, massacre and reintroduction of the wild wolf. Thought provoking an still highly relevant. Should be on every university zoology/biology major's mandatory reading list. Barry Lopez at his best. ( )
  dele2451 | Mar 15, 2024 |
More scientific than I was expecting. ( )
  Grace.Van.Moer | Sep 22, 2021 |
A few random quotes:

"Imagine a wolf moving through the northern woods. The movement, over a trail he has traversed many times before, is distinctive, unlike that of a cougar or a bear, yet he appears, if you are watching, sometimes catlike or bearlike. It is purposeful, deliberate movement. Occasionally the rhythm is broken by the wolf's pause to inspect a scent mark, or a move off the trail to paw among stones where a year before he had cached meat."

"The movement down the trail would seem relentless if it did not appear so effortless. The wolf's body, from neck to hips, appear to float over the long, almost spindly legs and the flicker of wrists, a bicycling drift through the trees, reminiscent of the movement of water or of shadows."

"The wolf is tied by subtle threads to the woods he moves through. His fur carries seeds that will fall off, effectively dispersed, along the trail some miles from where they first caught in his fur. And miles distant is a raven perched on the ribs of a caribou the wolf helped kill then days ago, pecking like a chicken at the decaying scraps of meat. A smart snowshow hare that eluded the wolf and left him exhausted when he was a pup has been dead a year now, food for an owl. The den in which he was born one April evening was home to porcupines last winter."

"I called this exchange in which the animals appear to lock eyes and make a decision the conversation of death. It is a ceremnonial exchange, the flesh of the hunted in exchange for respect for its spirit. In this way both animals, not the predator alone, choose for the encounter to end in death. There is, at least, a sacred order in this. There is nobility. And it is something that happens only between the wolf and his major prey species. It produces, for the wolf, sacred meat. Imagine a cow in the place of the moose or white-tailed deer. The conversation of death falters noticeably with domestic stock. They have had the conversation of death bred out of them; they do not know ho to encounter wolves. A horse, for example-- a large animal as capable as a moose of crackling a wolf's ribs or splitting its head open with a kick-- will usually panic and run. What happens whena wolf wanders into a flock of sheep and kills twenty or thirty of them in apparent compulsion is perhaps not so much slaughter as a failure on the part of the sheep to communicate anything at all-- resistance, mutual respect, appropriateness-- to the wolf. The wolf has initiated a sacred ritual and met with ignorance."

"We are dealing with a different kind of death from the one men know. When the wolf "asks" for the life of another animal he is responding to something in that animal that says, "My life is strong. It is worth asking for." A moose may be biologically constrained to die because he is old or injured, but the choice is there. The death is not tragic. It has dignity."

"Men in a speculative business like cattle ranching singled out one scapegoat for their financial losses. Hired hands were readily available and anxious to do the killing. There was a feeling that as long as someone was out killing. There was a feeling that as long as someone was out killing wolves, things were bound to get better. And the wolf had few sympathizers. The history of economic expansion in the West was characterized by the change or destruction of much that lay in its way. Dead wolves were what Manifest Destiny cost."

"By and large, the kinds of men who did the killing in the 1880s and 1890s were drifters who gave strong lip service to Progress, the mandate to subdue the earth, and the ghoulish nature of the wolf. Ben Corbin, a frontier roustabout who at one point killed wolves for a living, left his wolf-hunting wisdom behind in the pages of a privately printed booklet called The Wolf Hunter's Guide (1901). It is typical of hundreds of other such memoirs in that it has very little to say aobut how to actually kill woves but a great deal to say about the Bible, free trade, the privilege of living in a democracy, and the foulness of the wolf's ways. It expresses the sentiments of the day and is full of bad biology and fantastic calculations."

( )
  runningbeardbooks | Sep 29, 2020 |
I first heard of Barry Lopez when someone I knew recommended that I read Arctic Dreams. That book will always remain one of my favorites. There are moments in there that transcend anything other "nature writers" offer. This is because Lopez is always trying to see the world through the eyes of the animals, or at least doing his best to not let his own cultural conditioning get in the way.

In Of Wolves and Men, Lopez explores the subject of wolves from many viewpoints. He looks at the wolf in the wild: how it operates, what it is really like, how some other human cultures have come to embrace it. He also looks at the sad history of man's war on wolves, a war not deserved by this incredible creature. It seems a little odd to me that we forget where dogs come from when we attack wolves, but of course the lore about wolves goes back to ancient times. Lopez explores the mythology and the history of writing about wolves, how they have been portrayed over the centuries. Finally, he hopes that we can finally allow the wolf to be.

There are many beautiful lines in here. I have added them as favorite quotations on Goodreads.com. So much about perception and reality. Lopez is not only a fine nature writer; he is a fine writer period. ( )
  slojudy | Sep 8, 2020 |
599.74
  OakGrove-KFA | Mar 28, 2020 |
Affichage de 1-5 de 11 (suivant | tout afficher)
aucune critique | ajouter une critique
Vous devez vous identifier pour modifier le Partage des connaissances.
Pour plus d'aide, voir la page Aide sur le Partage des connaissances [en anglais].
Titre canonique
Informations provenant du Partage des connaissances suédois. Modifiez pour passer à votre langue.
Titre original
Titres alternatifs
Date de première publication
Personnes ou personnages
Lieux importants
Évènements importants
Films connexes
Épigraphe
Dédicace
Premiers mots
Citations
Derniers mots
Notice de désambigüisation
Directeur de publication
Courtes éloges de critiques
Langue d'origine
DDC/MDS canonique
LCC canonique
Originally Published in 1978, this special twenty-fifth-anniversary edition of the National Book Award finalist includes an entirely new afterword in which the author considers the current state of knowledge about wolves and recent efforts to rein-troduce wolves to their former habitats in American wilderness areas. Humankind's relationship with the wolf is based on a spectrum of responses running from fear to admiration and affection. Lopez's classic, careful study won praise from a wide range of reviewers and went on to improve the way books about wild animals are written. Of Wolves and Men reveals the uneasy interaction between wolves and civilization over the centuries, and the wolf's prominence in our thoughts about wild creatures. Drawing on an astonishing array of literature, history, science, and mythology as well as considerable personal experience with captive and free-ranging wolves, Lopez argues for the necessity of the wolf's preservation and envelops the reader in its sensory world, creating a compelling picture of the wolf both as real animal and as imagined by man. A scientist might perceive the wolf as defined by research data, while an Eskimo hunter sees a family provider much like himself. For many Native Americans the wolf is also a spiritual symbol, a respected animal that can make both the individual and the community stronger. With irresistible charm and elegance, Of Wolves and Men celebrates scientific fieldwork, dispels folklore that has enabled the Western mind to demonize wolves, explains myths, and honors indigenous traditions, allowing us to further understand how this incredible animal has come to live so strongly in the human heart.

Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque

Description du livre
Résumé sous forme de haïku

Discussion en cours

Aucun

Couvertures populaires

Vos raccourcis

Évaluation

Moyenne: (4.25)
0.5
1
1.5
2
2.5 1
3 16
3.5 3
4 40
4.5 5
5 44

Est-ce vous ?

Devenez un(e) auteur LibraryThing.

 

À propos | Contact | LibraryThing.com | Respect de la vie privée et règles d'utilisation | Aide/FAQ | Blog | Boutique | APIs | TinyCat | Bibliothèques historiques | Critiques en avant-première | Partage des connaissances | 203,187,660 livres! | Barre supérieure: Toujours visible