Wildhood
the epic journey from adolescence to adulthood in humans and other animals
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- 14,99 €
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- 14,99 €
Publisher Description
A revelatory investigation of human and animal adolescence from the New York Times bestselling authors of Zoobiquity.
Teenagers: behind the banter, the tediously repetitive games and clicks, the moping and screaming, the fast living, and the jockeying and preening lie the rules of the entire animal kingdom. Based on their popular Harvard University course, latest research, and worldwide travels, Natterson-Horowitz and Bowers examine the four universal challenges that every adolescent on our planet must face on the journey to adulthood: how to be safe, how to navigate hierarchy, how to court potential mates, and how to leave the nest. Safety, status, sex, and survival.
For parents and children, predators and prey alike, this is a powerfully revelatory book, entertainingly written. To become, as its reader does, for a while, a young bat or a young humpback whale, or even an octopus tapping a shrimp on the shoulder or an orca silencing their victim, is a giddying experience. The authors open up horizons for their ordinary human readers as they go about their daily animal lives, and permit them to look afresh at the confusing and exhilarating experience of adolescence. Even your average teen will not get bored.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Human teens have much in common with their counterparts throughout the animal kingdom and those commonalities are eye-opening as described in the latest from biologist Natterson-Horowitz and science journalist Bowers (coauthors of Zoobiquity). They reveal how a wide variety of species, fruit flies and pumas alike, must negotiate four competencies while entering adulthood: safety, socialization, sex, and self-reliance. Readers follow Ursula, a king penguin; Shrink, a hyena; Salt, a humpback whale; and Slavc, a wolf, as they deal with sex, friendship, and parents. Cultural references pepper the narrative (Katniss Everdeen is used as an example of youthful survival skills) and lighten the mood (while "ABBA and the Bee Gees were on the Billboard Hot 100..., a young whale found her first love"). Harsh reality also plays a role: as with humans, the teens of other species can and do put themselves in peril (a biologist relates a rite of passage among California sea otters, of entering the great white inhabited "triangle of death" off the coast). But this work is ultimately reassuring as in its message that "the joys, the tragedies, the passions" of adolescence are not senseless, but "make exquisite evolutionary sense" and should appeal to anyone who's ever raised an adolescent, human or otherwise.)
