Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    The Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America
    Unavailable
    The Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America
    Unavailable
    The Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America
    Audiobook10 hours

    The Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America

    Written by Jon Mooallem

    Narrated by Fred Sanders

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    Field notes from an age of extinction, tracking the ever-shifting meaning of America's animals throughout history to understand the current moment

    Journalist Jon Mooallem has watched his little daughter's world overflow with animals-butterfly pajamas, appliquéd owls-while the actual world she's inheriting slides into a great storm of extinction. Half of all species could disappear by the end of the century, and scientists now concede that most of America's endangered animals will survive only if conservationists keep rigging the world around them in their favor. So Mooallem ventures into the field, often taking his daughter with him, to move beyond childlike fascination and make those creatures feel more real. Wild Ones is a tour through our environmental moment and the eccentric cultural history of people and wild animals in America that inflects it-from Thomas Jefferson's celebrations of early abundance to the turn-of-the-last-century origins of the teddy bear to the whale-loving hippies of the 1970s. In America, Wild Ones discovers, wildlife has always inhabited the terrain of our imagination as much as the actual land.

    The journey is framed by the stories of three modern-day endangered species: the polar bear, victimized by climate change and ogled by tourists outside a remote, northern town; the little-known Lange's metalmark butterfly, foundering on a shred of industrialized land near San Francisco; and the whooping crane as it's led on a months-long migration by costumed men in ultralight airplanes. The wilderness that Wild Ones navigates is a scrappy, disorderly place where amateur conservationists do grueling, sometimes preposterous looking work; where a marketer maneuvers to control the polar bear's image; and Martha Stewart turns up to film those beasts for her show on the Hallmark Channel. Our most comforting ideas about nature unravel. In their place, Mooallem forges a new and affirming vision of the human animal and the wild ones as kindred creatures on an imperfect planet.

    With propulsive curiosity and searing wit, and without the easy moralizing and nature worship of environmental journalism's older guard, Wild Ones merges reportage, science, and history into a humane and endearing meditation on what it means to live in, and bring a life into, a broken world.

    Editor's Note

    The endangered...

    Mooallem masterfully blends first-hand reportage, science, and cultural history as he forces us to re-examine our relationship with endangered species, and what, if anything, we can do to save them.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateMay 16, 2013
    ISBN9781101620311
    Unavailable
    The Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America

    Related to The Wild Ones

    Related audiobooks

    Biology For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      The Rise & Fall of the Terror Birds

      Mar 1, 2020

      The Rise & Fall of the Terror Birds
      5 min read

    • Article

      Home Away From Home

      Sep 26, 2022

      Home Away From Home
      7 min read

    • Article

      We Crush, Poison, and Destroy Insects at Our Own Peril

      Jan 20, 2021

      This past summer, my wife and I ventured to an area near Mount Adams in southwestern Washington state to census bumblebees. We camped there over the weekend as we took part in the Pacific Northwest Bumblebee Atlas survey. Scientists want to fill gaps

      9 min read

    • Article

      Hope On The Wing

      Nov 15, 2021

      Hope On The Wing
      3 min read

    • Article

      Winging It

      Mar 17, 2023

      Taking a numerical approach to the natural world – as in Simon Barnes’s History of the World in 100 Plants, for example – is a handy way to carve off a manageable slice from a potential plethora of examples. There are, for instance, nearly 10,000 bir

      2 min read

    • Article

      Our Wild World

      Nov 28, 2019

      Our Wild World
      5 min read

    • Article

      Clarion Call

      Feb 8, 2020

      Clarion Call
      4 min read

    • Article

      Modern Nature British Photographs from the Hyman Collection

      Nov 6, 2018

      Our current relationship with the natural world is complex: for the first time in history, more of us are living in urban environments than in the countryside, and yet our need to connect with nature has never been greater. We may not be required to

      2 min read

    • Article

      Bird Books For The Lockdown

      Jun 6, 2020

      Vesper Flights, by Helen Macdonald, Grove Atlantic, 2020, hardcover, 272 pages, $27. Helen Macdonald, author of the widely acclaimed H is for Hawk, says the subject that underlies everything she writes is a “love for the glittering world of non-human

      3 min read

    • Article

      The Case for Bringing Back the Passenger Pigeon: One geneticist’s quest to de-extinct what was once one of the world’s most abundant birds.

      Nov 17, 2016

      North Dakota is not known for its pigeons. Or forests, for that matter. The state bird is the western meadowlark, a mellifluous yellow songbird often seen singing on fence posts. Such posts substitute for trees in much of North Dakota. The state is p

      11 min read

    • Article

      The Lure Of Leopards

      Oct 14, 2023

      Hosana. Hukumuri. Tavangumi. Three male leopards, two in their prime, who have fallen to human-wildlife conflict. Only Hosana is named in this incredible book in the Remembering Wildlife series. He was shot, allegedly by a member of an anti-poaching

      2 min read

    • Article

      Rhino Named SUDAN

      Jan 5, 2023

      Rhino Named SUDAN
      6 min read

    • Article

      Rhino Named SUDAN

      Feb 5, 2022

      Rhino Named SUDAN
      6 min read

    • Article

      BOOKS & MUSIC

      Jan 26, 2024

      by Nick Norman, The Franschhoek Press R295 in bookstores While working on a mining project in Brazil in the 1970s, geologist Nick Norman noticed something peculiar in southern Bahia: a woodpecker that bore a striking resemblance to those he knew back

      5 min read

    • Article

      The Man Who Used Facebook to Find an Extinct Human Species: Lee Berger has a knack for finding fossils his own way.

      Nov 19, 2015

      In some sense, Lee Rogers Berger found himself and the drowning woman at the same time. The Georgia native had just returned home after dropping out of Vanderbilt University, where terrible grades in his pre-law major and straight As in his electives

      8 min read

    • Article

      Vivid Tale Of Three Leopards

      Oct 14, 2023

      Hosana. Hukumuri. Tavangumi. Three male leopards, two in their prime, who have fallen to human-wildlife conflict. Only Hosana is named in this incredible book in the Remembering Wildlife series. He was shot, allegedly by a member of an anti-poaching

      2 min read

    • Article

      Lure Of Leopards

      Oct 14, 2023

      Hosana. Hukumuri. Tavangumi. Three male leopards, two in their prime, who have fallen to human-wildlife conflict. Only Hosana is named in this incredible book in the Remembering Wildlife series. He was shot, allegedly by a member of an anti-poaching

      2 min read

    • Article

      Who Invited You?

      Mar 1, 2023

      Marauding camels from Afghanistan, India, and the Middle East overrun Australia. The “invaders” flatten fences, topple into wells, and devour native plants. Meanwhile, toxic toads originally from Central and South America multiply without mercy and p

      3 min read

    • Article

      Who Invited You?

      Mar 1, 2023

      Marauding camels from Afghanistan, India, and the Middle East overrun Australia. The “invaders” flatten fences, topple into wells, and devour native plants. Meanwhile, toxic toads originally from Central and South America multiply without mercy and p

      3 min read

    • Article

      Unnatural Selection

      Feb 14, 2024

      Unnatural Selection
      14 min read

    • Article

      Fantastical Botanical

      Mar 9, 2023

      Fantastical Botanical
      4 min read

    Reviews for The Wild Ones

    4/5

    37 ratings2 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      One of my favorite podcasts, 99% Invisible, just featured the author on a recent episode doing a live performance of his book and that got me heading to the library to find a copy.
      A very fascinating and readable book about the nation's animal populations and how we are trying to save and repopulate some of them. It's amazing the lengths and ways that this is being done all across this land. Great book.
    • 4/5
      Lively, interesting cultural history of conservation.