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(More customer reviews)to Graeme Gibson's The Bedside Book of Birds: An Avian Miscellany. Both books are absolutely beautiful: heavy paper, excellent binding, gorgeous reproductions and printing. The page images here on Amazon are really excellent, but don't convey the full beauty of the images on paper. Best of all, the books nestle in your hands -- a book lover's ideal.
Gibson has collected not only beautiful and interesting images, but also interesting quotes about beasts that prey on other animals:
""The term `beasts' belongs properly to lions, leopards and tigers, wolves and foxes, dogs and monkeys, and all others (except snakes) which rage by mouth or with claws. They are called `beasts' from the force with which they rage; and they are termed `wild' because they are by nature used to freedom and they are motivated by their own will. They do indeed have freedom of will and they wander here and there, going as their spirit leads them." --The Peterborough Bestiary (14th C.)
The OED entry for "beast" is a great supplement to Gibson's collection reflecting the diversity of definitions of the word; for example, 1751 CHAMBERS Cycl. s.v., "Beasts of Chase, in our statute-books are five; the buck, doe, fox, martin, and roe. Beasts of the forest are, the hart, hind, hare, boar, and wolf. Beasts and fowls of the warren are, the hare, coney, pheasant, and partridge."
Fantastic beasts appear: the Minotaur, Grendel, and the Leviathan, in words and wonderous images. Knopf Doubleday has added a number of pages showing these and other wonders on its website devoted to the book.
Gibson's broader message is environmental; his excellent short essays tie the book together and he seeks to instill a sort of reverence for animals and their "elemental' connection with humans. For example, he quotes a 19th-century Canadian explorer who shot a bear. The Indians with him rejoiced -- but told him he must now blow tobacco smoke into the dead bear's nostrils to appease its anger. In the next passage, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas describes a puma that kills a sheep, and the "gazes fondly into the sheep's eyes". (The Tribe of Tiger: Cats and Their Culture.) Gibson seems to be demonstrating that it's easy to swing between the reverence and the maudlin.
He recognizes that humans have always hunted animals and he quotes his wife Margaret Atwood's poem "It's Autumn" to demonstrate the conflicting feelings about the hunt (from The Door):
It's autumn. The nuts patter down.
Beechnuts, acorns, blackwalnuts --
tree orphans thrown to the ground
in their hard garments.
Don't go in there,
into the faded orange wood -
it's filled with angry old men
sneaking around in camouflage gear
pretending no one can see them.
***
They shoot at any sign of movement -
your dog, your cat, you.
They'll say you were a fox or skunk,
or duck, or pheasant, maybe a deer.
These aren't hunters, these men.
They have none of the patience of hunters,
none of the remorse.
They're certain they own everything.
A hunter knows he borrows.
***
Gibson has a light hand on the environmental issue, though -- many of the quotations describe other aspects of the complex relationships between the hunters and the hunted. This wonderful book makes a great present for any nature lover, and even better accompanied by a copy of The Bedside Book of Birds: An Avian Miscellany. Triumphs, both.
Robert C. Ross 2009
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