Eight Bears: Mythic Past and Imperiled Future
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4.5 • 4 Ratings
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
A Best Book of the Year in The New Yorker, Economist, and Science News
A Scientific American Best Staff Read
Shortlisted for the Banff Centre Mountain Book Awards
"Vivid and engrossing.… [A] celebration of beardom." —Richard Adams Carey, Wall Street Journal
A global exploration of the eight remaining species of bears—and the dangers they face.
Bears have always held a central place in our collective memory, from Indigenous folklore and Greek mythology to nineteenth-century fairytales and the modern toy shop. But as humans and bears come into ever-closer contact, our relationship nears a tipping point. Today, most of the eight remaining bear species are threatened with extinction. Some, such as the panda bear and the polar bear, are icons of the natural world; others, such as the spectacled bear and the sloth bear, are far less known.
In Eight Bears, journalist Gloria Dickie embarks on a globe-trotting journey to explore each bear’s story, whisking readers from the cloud forests of the Andes to the ice floes of the Arctic; from the jungles of India to the backwoods of the Rocky Mountain West. She meets with key figures on the frontlines of modern conservation efforts—the head of a rescue center for sun and moon bears freed from bile farms, a biologist known as Papa Panda, who has led China’s panda-breeding efforts for almost four decades, a conservationist retraining a military radar system to detect and track polar bears near towns—to reveal the unparalleled challenges bears face as they contend with a rapidly changing climate and encroaching human populations.
Weaving together ecology, history, mythology, and a captivating account of her travels and observations, Dickie offers a closer look at our volatile relationship with these magnificent mammals. Engrossing and deeply reported, Eight Bears delivers a clear warning for what we risk losing if we don’t learn to live alongside the animals that have shaped our cultures, geographies, and stories.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Dickie debuts with a superb study of the eight surviving species of bears. Recounting her travels in search of spectacled bears in Ecuador and Peru, sloth bears in rural India, pandas in China, sun and moon bears in South Vietnam, black and grizzly bears in the western U.S., and polar bears in the Canadian arctic, Dickie details the threats faced by each and profiles the conservationists who protect them. Among the more heartwarming stories are those of a Chinese scientist nicknamed Papa Panda, who teaches captive pandas how to breed, and Chris Servheen, the biologist who spearheaded the effort to bring grizzly bears back from the brink of extinction in the U.S. Other dispatches are more somber, as when Dickie discusses how deforestation in Southeast Asia is threatening sloth bears' long-term survival and describes the horrific conditions under which caged sun and moon bears have their bile harvested for use in traditional Vietnamese medicine. The searching accounts of threats faced by bears across the globe illuminate the struggles conservationists face, and the crisp prose will transport readers ("I glanced nervously toward the dark bay in the distance. The cobalt sky concealed the secrets of the muskeg," Dickie writes about the time she was in Churchill, Canada, and suspected she was being stalked by a polar bear). It's a winning combination of travel and environmental reporting.
