From Powells.com
Our favorite books of the year.
Staff Pick
Now that more and more of us have had encounters with the great Canis latrans, it would do us all good to learn more about this clever animal. Coyote America takes us through their storied past with a nod to the future, revealing how they’ve managed to survive – and thrive – for centuries beside humans. Recommended By Renee P., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
A natural history of the coyote—whose success story and adaptability mirror humanity's own
With its uncanny night howls, unrivaled ingenuity, and amazing resilience, the coyote is the stuff of legends. In Indian folktales it often appears as a deceptive trickster or a sly genius. But legends don't come close to capturing the incredible survival story of the coyote. As soon as Americans-especially white Americans-began ranching and herding in the West, they began working to destroy the coyote. Despite campaigns of annihilation employing poisons, gases, helicopters, and engineered epidemics, coyotes didn't just survive, they thrived, expanding across the continent from Anchorage, Alaska, to New York's Central Park. In the war between humans and coyotes, coyotes have won hands-down.
Coyote America is both an environmental and a deep natural history of the coyote. It traces both the five-million-year-long biological story of an animal that has become the “wolf” in our backyards, as well as its cultural evolution from a preeminent spot in Native American religions to the hapless foil of the Road Runner. A deeply American tale, the story of the coyote in the American West and beyond is a sort of Manifest Destiny in reverse, with a pioneering hero whose career holds up an uncanny mirror to the successes and failures of American expansionism.
An illuminating biography of this extraordinary animal, Coyote America isn't just the story of an animal's survival-it is one of the great epics of our time.
Review
"[An] absorbing book....The coyote stories in this book are among the best, and Flores is a master storyteller." Natural History
Review
"[A] fascinating scientific and cultural history.... Deft prose and wide-ranging research do their part to carry Flores through the grimmer chapters of his narrative.... Whatever the coyote may still be wanting, that list no longer includes a book to do it justice." New Mexico Magazine
Review
"It is often impossible to separate how animals behave ‘wild' from how they behave around humans. Coyotes are a startling example.... Historian Dan Flores has fun describing how coyotes make a mockery of our attempts to put nature in order: ‘It turns out, the coyote really is The Dude, and The Dude absolutely abides.'" New Scientist
About the Author
Dan Flores is the A. B. Hammond Professor Emeritus of Western History at the University of Montana and the author of ten books on aspects of western US history. Flores lives just outside Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Dan Flores on PowellsBooks.Blog
Coyote stories are the original literary canon of the American experience, extending back 10,000 years into the continental past and producing a sprawling body of hundreds of stories featuring a semi-deity, Coyote Man, as a stand-in for human beings. The purpose of the stories is to hold up for scrutiny what we surely ought to call — if we are, after all, evolutionists — human nature, and Coyote is a true artiste at the task...
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