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For fans of Helen MacDonald's H is for Hawk and Mary Roach, Erica Berry's WOLFISH blends science, history, and cultural criticism in a years-long journey to understand our myths about wolves, and track one legendary wolf, OR-7, from the Wallowa Mountains of Oregon
So begins Erica Berry's kaleidoscopic exploration of wolves, both real and symbolic. At the center of this lyrical inquiry is the legendary OR-7, who roams away from his familial pack in northeastern Oregon. While charting OR-7's record-breaking journey out of the Wallowa Mountains, Erica simultaneously details her own coming-of-age as she moves away from home and wrestles with inherited beliefs about fear, danger, femininity, and the body.
As Erica chronicles her own migration-from crying wolf as a child on her grandfather's sheep farm to accidentally eating mandrake in Sicily-she searches for new expressions for how to be a brave woman, human, and animal in our warming world. What do stories so long told about wolves tell us about our relationship to fear? How can our society peel back the layers of what scares us? By strategically unspooling the strands of our cultural constructions of predator and prey, and what it means to navigate a world in which we can be both, Erica bridges the gap between human fear and grief through the lens of a wrongfully misunderstood species.
Wolfish is for anybody trying to navigate a world that is often scary. A powerful, timeless, and necessary book for our current and future generations.
So begins Erica Berry's kaleidoscopic exploration of wolves, both real and symbolic. At the center of this lyrical inquiry is the legendary OR-7, who roams away from his familial pack in northeastern Oregon. While charting OR-7's record-breaking journey out of the Wallowa Mountains, Erica simultaneously details her own coming-of-age as she moves away from home and wrestles with inherited beliefs about fear, danger, femininity, and the body.
As Erica chronicles her own migration-from crying wolf as a child on her grandfather's sheep farm to accidentally eating mandrake in Sicily-she searches for new expressions for how to be a brave woman, human, and animal in our warming world. What do stories so long told about wolves tell us about our relationship to fear? How can our society peel back the layers of what scares us? By strategically unspooling the strands of our cultural constructions of predator and prey, and what it means to navigate a world in which we can be both, Erica bridges the gap between human fear and grief through the lens of a wrongfully misunderstood species.
Wolfish is for anybody trying to navigate a world that is often scary. A powerful, timeless, and necessary book for our current and future generations.
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Reviews
"Far more than a book about an animal, this is a book about how fear shapes the world...The prose itself in Wolfish is brisk and essayistic, and makes for a compelling read… Wolfish is a fascinating document."
The New Republic
"The type of nonfiction book that any can read regardless of their interests as long as they like damn good writing… Berry smashes expectations for what a book can do."
Debutiful
"Richly discursive…Berry draws on a huge, rich depository of lupine literature…The book's most obvious ancestor is Helen Macdonald's megahit of 2014, H Is for Hawk; it has that same intellectual range…"
The Sunday Times