The Animal Dialogues

Starred review from October 29, 2007
In these eloquent essays, naturalist and adventurer Childs (House of Rain
) describes some of his extraordinary experiences with creatures—from wasps, red-spotted toads and hummingbirds to grizzly bears, coyotes and jaguars. Seeking entrée into animal societies, he interprets messages left in marks on the ground and in scents on leaves and trees, and communicates with animals directly using their own language of stares, gestures, postures, sounds, scents and gaits. He goes looking for animals alone in hazardous wilderness areas—tracking mountain goats in Colorado’s Gore Range or surprising a secret society of ravens in a canyon in Utah. Always longing to be at one with animals, he is not afraid to climb an aspen to see the world from a porcupine’s perspective, run with a herd of elk or wonder how it would feel to jump from a plane and fly with a bald eagle. Childs’s captivating essays, rich in sensuous imagery (the porcupine “looks like a mop, a bundle of ponderosa pine needles, a mobile hairstyle”), are hauntingly beautiful and replete with evocative observations of animal life. 42 b&w illus.

December 15, 2007
In an evocative series of essays, Childs writes of moments of connection betweenanimal and human: hiking a desert canyon, descending by hand- and foot-holds, and almost stepping on a mountain lion, or finding a raccoon trapped in a desert pool and the epic battle that ensued when Childs rescued it. Sleeping in a tepee with opened flaps and being awakened by the breeze from a hovering hummingbirds wings. Or a praying mantis that crashed a picnic, observing Childs with its bulbous gaze. In lyrical language, Childs places the reader in the moment, and we feel the power of a spotted owl catching a mouse, the drama of an elk herd crashing through the snow, or the swaying of trees in the wind as Childs climbs with a porcupine. A book for dipping into during quiet moments, Childs essayswill teach all comers how to get inside the moment and touch the animals with which we share our planet.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2007, American Library Association.)