Never Cry Wolf
Biologist Farley Mowat was dropped into Eskimo lands by the Canadian Government, that was looking for an excuse to eradicate wolves. What he discovered instead was astonishing. The Eskimos were listening to wolves from five miles away, messages from the Canis lupus telegraph system. One example was the instance that two men and a woman were going to arrive in three days. All these communications were veridicated! Their social structure was self-aware and intelligent. They were NOT eating up all the caribou, as the Government wanted to project, but cleaning up mice in plague proportions. Yum. His scientific reportage was meanwhile hilariously funny, and the book is magnificent.
Stats for nerds
2recommend
5mentions
4people
2019–2025years
40% recommend60% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Have Space Suit Will Travel (Heinlein)
Stranger in a Strange Land (Heinlein)
Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption (one story in the book "Different Seasons" by Stephen King)
Of Mice and Men (Steinbeck)
The Martian Chronicles (Bradbury)
Roadside Picnic (Strugatsky)
Frankenstein (Shelley)
Brave New World (Huxley)
Farenheit 451 (Heinlein)
Never Cry Wolf (Mowatt)
A Whale for the Killing (Mowatt)
The Machine Stops (Forster)
Heart of Darkness (Conrad)
Starship Troopers (Heinlein)
The Jungle Book (Kipling)
Lost in the Barrens (Mowatt)
The Republic (Plato)
Rendezvous with Rama (Clarke)
Ringworld (Niven)
The Stainless Steel Rat (Harrison)
The Hobbit (Tolkien)
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Stevenson)
The Odyssey (Homer)
The Man who Would be King (Kipling)
The Pearl (Steinbeck)
Thus Spake Zarathustra (Nietzsche)
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Dick)
A Scanner Darkly (Dick)
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Adams)
Dracula (Stoker)
To Kill a Mockingbird (Lee)
The Count of Monte Cristo (Dumas)
Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare)
The Wind in the Willows (Grahame)
A Christmas Carol (Dickens)
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass (Carroll)
Watership Down (Adams)
Gulliver's Travels (Swift)
Animal Farm (Orwell)
- Book recommendation: Never Cry Wolf, by Farley Mowat. It takes a pretty close look at wolves (among other things) in the Canadian far north in a highly readable book. Hilariously funny at times, Mowat comes to largely the same conclusion as the article: that wolves have more to fear from us than us from them. He nonetheless, like the author of TFA, finds it hard to overcome the primal fear we seem to have of wolves.
- Great overview of more complex vocal communications. Farley Mowat makes a similar case for wolves in Never Cry Wolf: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Never_Cry_Wolf
And almost certainly: cetaceans too.
- Farley Mowat, later known for Never Cry Wolf served in the battle at Ortona, and wrote a most interesting book about his war service, And No Birds Sang. (This could well be mentioned in the article, but I haven't evaded the paywall.)
- Honestly, I'd suggest starting out with a more contemporary and easy author before delving into the classics, for the same reasons Einstein gave about music: https://www.rd.com/article/the-night-i-met-einstein/
The classics tend to be harder to approach due to the many cultural references contemporary to their time, and also their literary devices and techniques that are part of what led to their selection as classics to begin with. Without that background knowledge, you'll feel lost and frustrated, and there's little point in reading things if you can't enjoy them.
I started my journey into history and the classics later in life. I never thought I'd ever actually enjoy reading Shakespeare, and yet King Lear is one of my favorites (but it takes a lot of background knowledge to enjoy).
So start with someone contemporary to the last 30 years or so. Think of the genres of TV shows or movies you do enjoy, and then seek out famous authors of those genres.
Here are some authors I've enjoyed in the more "addition and subtraction" end of literature. Temba, his arms wide:
- Stephen King (horror, suspense) - fun fact: Did you know that "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption" is one of the few non-horror short stories he wrote? And I daresay his best.
- Terry Pratchett (comedy, fantasy) - Spent many an evening giggling uncontrollably with his Discworld novels.
- Douglas Adams (comedy, scifi)
- Robert Heinlein (scifi) - "Stranger in a Strange Land" is still my favorite scifi story. This is where the term "grok" comes from.
- Tom Clancy (drama, thriller, spy)
- John Steinbeck (drama, depression era) - "Of Mice and Men" is particularly good, and a source of many references. Whenever you hear references to Lenny and the rabbits and the puppy, it's referring to this book.
- Farley Mowatt (drama, environmentalism) - Most famous for "Never Cry Wolf"
TBH I'm a little jealous... You're about to discover a whole world.
