Coyote America
A Natural and Supernatural History
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- USD 13.99
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- USD 13.99
Descripción editorial
The “engaging” (New Yorker), New York Times best-selling story of how coyotes took over North America—and are now taking over South America as well
Finalist for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award
"A masterly synthesis of scientific research and personal observation."—Wall Street Journal
Legends don’t come close to capturing the incredible survival story of the coyote. In the face of centuries of annihilation campaigns employing poisons, gases, helicopters, and bioweapons, coyotes didn’t just survive, they thrived, expanding across North America from Alaska to Florida and New York, and now, as this new edition explores, to South America as well. In the war between humans and coyotes, coyotes have won hands-down.
Coyote America traces both the five-million-year-long biological story of coyotes, as well as their cultural evolution from preeminence in Native American religions to haplessness before the Road Runner. A deeply American tale, the story of the coyote in the American West and then across the entire country 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 an extraordinary animal, Coyote America is one of the great epics of our time.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Flores (American Serengeti), emeritus professor of Western history at the University of Montana, looks at the coyote and its history on the North American continent in this educational volume. Having lived for a decade in the pi on-juniper mesas south of Santa Fe, N.Mex., "the evolutionary heartland of America's native canines," Flores considers the coyote's howl "the original national anthem of North America" one that dates back "nearly 1 million years." He traces the animal's roots, giving lessons on both physiology and mythology. "As a literary character," Flores notes, the coyote is a "complex figure full of nuances of all sorts" as well as a "trickster who is forever falling for the oldest trick in the book." Flores also presents accounts of coyotes in urban environments and their depictions in pop culture. For example, in Chicago during the 2007 heat wave, a coyote walked into a sandwich shop and jumped onto a freezer to cool down, to the surprise and amusement of employees and customers. Similarly, considerations of fictional characters such as Wile E. Coyote, introduced by Warner Bros. in 1949, provide entertaining counterpoints to the coyote's status as "North America's oldest surviving deity." Flores's mix of edification and entertainment is a welcome antidote to a creature so often viewed with fear. Illus.
