Fans of bears—and of hearty nature writing—will take pleasure in Chaney’s paean.
A well-written, learned exploration of the world of a charismatic and sometimes troublesome animal.
Montana native and journalist Chaney has been around grizzly bears for decades and, unlike most folks, has encountered them “outside the safety of a zoo enclosure or a car window.” Encounters of just about any sort evoke fear and/or reverence, and any closer knowledge of Ursus arctos horribilis requires a heady degree of risk. Early on, the author marvels at the skill and luck of a backwoods explorer in Glacier National Park who managed to bring down a charging grizzly with a .22 pistol, far less firepower than the .45s and .357s that other backwoods types typically pack. Those real-life encounters are ever more likely for humans who live in the New Hampshire–sized grizzly heartland, taking in portions of Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho. As Chaney notes, when the bear was first listed as endangered, “the Cray 1 Supercomputer set world records with a memory of eight megabytes,” a fraction of the computing power that we carry in our pockets. Just so, things change in the natural world, and the grizzly now turns up on porches and in driveways, not as afraid of us as it should be even as we prove ourselves to be its most dangerous foe. “The grizzly bear needs space: Hundreds of square miles per animal,” writes the author. “It needs food: Forty thousand calories a day. It needs tolerance, for the days it decides to take what we think rightfully belongs to us. It needs to be left alone.” Can we do so? Chaney is a writer in the Peter Matthiessen school, deftly weaving anecdotes and human history with ursine natural history and bringing in memorable characters. These include Doug Peacock and Chuck Jonkel, both of whom have done much to prove, as does this lucid book, that grizzlies lie somewhere between the vicious creatures of legend and the cuddly critters of our imagination.
Fans of bears—and of hearty nature writing—will take pleasure in Chaney’s paean.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-295-74793-4
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Univ. of Washington
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2020
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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