American Wolf

May 1, 2017

Winner of the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, Blakeslee's Tulia dealt with wrongful conviction in a small Texas town. His new work also deals with the wrongfully maligned, telling the story of the majestic wolf by focusing on O-Six, a legendary female wolf at Yellowstone beloved by rangers there. But ranchers and hunters are not on her side.

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from August 7, 2017
Blakeslee (Tulia), a writer at large for Texas Monthly, brings the feeling of a celebrity biography to the story of the reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone National Park and its aftermath. He centers on the rise, reign, and family life of O-Six, matriarch of the Lamar Canyon pack and so well-known to park visitors that the New York Times gave her an obituary. Blakeslee derives his beautiful, detailed descriptions of the interactions between wolves from a massive amount of observational material meticulously collected over years by wolf watcher Laurie Lyman and park wildlife expert Rick McIntyre. The latter receives a complementary profile here that almost works as a secondary biography in its own right. Blakeslee escorts readers up close to interpack conflict as well as human enemies of wolf preservation. He details legislative moves, which vary from state to state and are based in ranching politics more than science, that seek to remove wolves from the endangered list prematurely and establish hunting zones just outside of park limits—and within the ranges of the Yellowstone packs. Most extraordinarily, Blakeslee interviews the hunter who legally shot O-Six in 2012 (“She didn’t tell me she was famous before I shot her”), offering a close and unsympathetic view of the other side. Agent: David R. Patterson, Stuart Krichevsky Literary.

August 15, 2017
On-the-ground reporting on the fate of Canis lupus as a creature once nearly extirpated struggles to regain a home in the Rockies.Think life is tough for American humans? Try living as a wolf, even with the putative protection of the federal government in Yellowstone National Park. As Thomas McNamee reported 20 years ago in The Return of the Wolf to Yellowstone, reintroduction was a venture as much political as ecological. Now comes Texas Monthly writer Blakeslee (Tulia: Race, Cocaine, and Corruption in a Small Texas Town, 2005) to chronicle just how true that observation remains. The author serves up two protagonists: a renegade biologist named Rick McIntyre who, more than any living individual, was instrumental in returning the wolf to its former home and keeping it safe there, and a wolf named O-Six, an alpha female who was a star in the social media world thanks to some canny promotion by reintroduction activists. As Blakeslee tracks O-Six's movements through the Lamar Valley of Wyoming and surrounding areas, he examines the lives of other wolves in and around the park, some in her pack, others in competing wolf clans. O-Six's travels led to tragedy, as he writes; he interviews the hunter who killed her, who proudly tells him, "I'm against wolves...I want to make sure that's clear." It is. Blakeslee takes pains to try to understand the views of hunters and ranchers while making sure that it's similarly clear that the wolves merit a place in the sun. Along the way, he examines the long and ongoing back and forth of listing and delisting the wolf on the federal list of protected species, the wolf being, to many in the western states affected, a sort of federal agent and therefore automatically suspect. In the main, Blakeslee's well-rendered story will be familiar to anyone who has followed the Yellowstone wolves, but those who have not will find this a solid overview of recent events--evenhanded but clearly and rightly on the side of the wolves.

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Starred review from September 1, 2017
This story of the most famous wolf in the world is beautifully told by Blakeslee (Tulia, 2005), a writer for Texas Monthly. The 1995 return of wolves to Yellowstone National Park was a celebrated event, not only for the wildlife-loving tourists who were thrilled by the sighting of a wolf but also to wildlife biologists, who had a unique opportunity to study the wolves as they interacted with each other and with their prey. Blakeslee follows the story of female wolf O-Six, named for her birth year. A great-granddaughter of one of the famed pairs from Yellowstone's original releases, she was a favorite with wolf watchers and biologists alike. Her life embodied all that it means to be a wolf in Yellowstone: jockeying for space in an ecosystem where all territory is claimed, finding a mate and establishing a pack, ranging in and out of the park's boundaries, and coming up against the consequences of the politics of wolf reintroduction. The fight between federal and state control of Yellowstone's wolves is embodied in O-Six's story, told with great immediacy and empathy in a tale that reads like fiction. This one will grab readers and impel them into the heart of the conflict.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)