Man and the Natural World, an encyclopaedic study of man's relationship to animals and plants, is completely engrossing ... It explains everything - why we eat what we do, why we plant this and not that, why we keep pets, why we like some animals and not others, why we kill the things we kill and love the things we love ... It is often a funny book and one to read again and again.

The English historian Keith Thomas has revealed modes of thought and ways of life deeply strange to us

A treasury of unusual historical anecdote ... a delight to read and a pleasure to own

A dense and rich work ... the return to the grass roots of our own environmental convictions is made by the most enchantingly minor paths

David Quammen is a brilliant young star of nature writing... His book is an important example of the genre, written in an enchanting style. His knowledge, based on years of research and adventure around the world, is truly impressive

There aren't many writers like Charles around... His ability to step across emotional boundaries and enter the consciousness of the wild makes for an exhilarating, immersive, yet at times disturbing read. For me, the end result is a deeply thought-provoking book that encourages the reader to explore for themselves exactly where they stand on issues of humanity, conservation and moral legacy.

Fiercely polemical, forcing the reader to see the world in a new light... Charles Foster is an original thinker with a strangely compelling prose style... Cry of the Wild is thought-provoking, profound, at times infused with a beautifully wistful lyricism and often witty.

Foster [brings] a sense of wonder: geese fly in from the north with snow falling from their wings; imagined through the eyes of a young rabbit, a white owl wafts through the still night air like thistledown, a strangely beautiful occurrence that might at any moment end the rabbit's life... He avoids the temptations of anthropomorphism while reminding us that we who share these traits are more vulnerably and elegantly animal than we pretend.

A lyrical work of creative nonfiction containing eight stories of besieged animal lives. Emotional without being anthropomorphic, it is a thought-provoking read.

Ardent and arresting... one of the darkest, most haunting books I've read in a long time... Yet the stories are also motivated by such depth of attention and love that their very existence offers some hope for a better future.

I have read Cry of the Wild with something approaching awe... The conviction with which these characters live on the page and suffer the assaults of existence can certainly live happily and proudly alongside Tarka.

Like Tarka, the stories in Cry of the Wild are not written for children. They take on the qualities of myth and magic which touch the source of our deepest feelings. How does the word on the printed page do this? ... the prose is muscular and astonishing... "Immersion" is a word commonly used about reading these days. I dislike it intensely. The sound of the word feels cold, unpleasant, like being pressed underwater. Not at all the deep sobbing that emerged from somewhere as I sat with these stories... This is not like any other nature book.