Wild thoughts from wild places

Book

Wild thoughts from wild places / David Quammen.

Quammen, David, 1948- (Author).

Summary:

For the past two decades, David Quammen has followed winding trails and fresh lines of thought through the world's outback.

This book is a collection of twenty-three of Quammen's most intriguing, most exciting, most memorable pieces. In it you will meet seasoned professional kayakers on the Futaleufu River of southern Chile, where Quammen describes how it feels to travel in fast company and flail for survival in the river's maw. You will be introduced to the commerce in pearls (and black-market parrots) in the Aru Islands of eastern Indonesia and taken ambivalently along on a lion-hunting excursion through the mountains of Montana. At the Cincinnati Zoo, there is a lesson to be learned about the ugly truth behind those beautiful white tigers, and the celebration of a fiftieth wedding anniversary serves as occasion for pondering Einstein's ideas on the relativity of time.

Even within the boundaries of smog-choked Los Angeles, Quammen finds wildness - embodied in an elusive population of urban coyotes, too stubborn and too clever to surrender to the sprawl of civilization.

Record details

ISBN: 0684835096
ISBN: 9780684835099
Physical Description: 304 pages ; 25 cm
Publisher: New York : Scribner, �1998.

Content descriptions

Bibliography, etc. Note:: Includes bibliographical references (pages 275-291) and index.
Formatted Contents Note:: The river: Synecdoche and the trout -- Time and tide on the Ocoee River -- Vortex -- Only connect -- Grabbing the loop -- The city: The white tigers of Cincinnati -- To live and die in L.A. -- Reaction wood -- Superdove on 46th Street -- Before the fall -- The mountains: Pinhead secrets -- The keys to kingdom come -- Karl's sense of snow -- The trees cry out on Currawong Moor -- The big turn -- Eat of this flesh -- The heart: The swallow that hibernates underwater -- Trinket from Aru -- Bagpipes for Ed -- Point of attachment -- Voice part for a duet -- Love in the age of relativity -- Strawberries under ice.