Animal Heart
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
“Brenda Peterson weaves a haunting love story into a fast-moving plot. Animal Heart is based on facts that are terrifyingly true, and it captures the exquisite beauty of a world that we are devastating and destroying, piece by piece. Please read it.”
--Jane Goodall, author of Reason for Hope
When an eerie mass stranding of whales and dolphins takes place along the mist-shrouded Oregon coast, forensic wildlife pathologist Isabel Spinner covertly investigates this disaster as a crime against wildlife. When Isabel connects with Marshall McGreggor, an undersea photographer, the two find themselves making surprising decisions – that will forever change their lives.
In her new environmental thriller, Peterson offers a captivating love story of people whose compassion for animals compels them into extraordinary acts of heroism. Based on cutting-edge science, this powerful page-turner is a haunting, highly original story of the deep bonds between humans and animals – and of our inevitably linked fates.
“One can hardly imagine a more heartfelt work or a more unusual love story than this one. Highly recommended for all public and academic libraries.” ~ Library Journal
“This is a galvanizing and enlightening tale thanks to Peterson's expert portrayal of animals, compassionate view of radical activism, and illuminating insights into our profound bonds with other species.” ~ Booklist
“Animal Heart is more than simply an "eco-novel"— it is human drama based on the integrity of individuals who recognize "cellular knowledge," what we intrinsically share with other species, as the compassion necessary toward our next evolutionary step as human beings.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, author Refuge
“[A] gripping tale about love, xenotransplantation and the military-industrial complex’s flagrant disregard for environmental responsibility. . .Peterson’s passion shines through.” Publisher’s Weekly
“Strangely gratifying narratives…stand ably and intriguingly on their own six feet: love story, natural-history lesson, mysticism, direct-action radical politics, xenotransplantation, and redemption…. Novelist and memoirist Peterson is most comfortable in the precincts of natural history, where the book draws its passion . . .She writes with force and concision about poachers and the hugely destructive recklessness of military testing. Provocative in the best sense: it gets the reader mad enough to care.”
~ Kirkus Reviews
From the award-winning author of I Want To Be Left Behind: Finding Rapture Here on Earth, which The Christian Science Monitor named as a “Top Ten Best Non-Fiction Book of the Year.”
http://www.IWantToBeLeftBehind.com
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Novelist and nature writer Peterson (Duck and Cover; Nature and Our Mothers) crafts an uneven and melodramatic but gripping tale about love, xenotransplantation (transplanting organs and tissue across species) and the military-industrial complex's flagrant disregard for environmental responsibility. Two forensic wildlife pathologists Isabel Spinner (a restless, dedicated animal lover and second-generation Scot) and Marian Windhorse Gray (a beautiful, flirty Oskeena Native American) join Isabel's underwater photographer brother, Andrew, and his associate, obsidian-eyed Marshall McGreggor, for a dive to photograph an undersea volcano off the Oregon coast, when Marshall suffers a massive coronary. Lacking a healthy human heart, doctors implant the heart of a baboon, forcing Marshall to come to terms with his status as xenotransplantation guinea pig as well as his sudden and disturbing dreams of being a baboon on a savanna. He makes a miraculous recovery and becomes friends with spunky Irene Feinstein, a young woman with a pig valve in her heart, but is increasingly troubled by dreams of Hara, a female baboon in distress. Meanwhile, a disastrous beaching of whales and dolphins on the Oregon coast leads to the discovery that underwater U.S. military experiments with mid-to-low-frequency active sonar may be destroying the inner ears of the sea mammals. Is this just sonar or the prototype for some new and terrible weapon? When Irene tells Marshall that Hara is being held in a Portland animal testing lab, they, aided by Andrew and a bunch of activists, orchestrate a daring rescue before they head back to the coast to try to stop the sonar experiments. Clunky exposition and credibility-straining twists mar the book, but Peterson's passion shines through.
