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Charles Waterton 1782-1865
Charles Waterton 1782-1865
Nov 27, 2024 9:36 AM

Author:Julia Blackburn

Charles Waterton 1782-1865

Charles Waterton was the first conservationist who fought to protect wild nature against the destruction and pollution of Victorian industrialisation. During his lifetime he was famous for his eccentricities, but also for his achievements and his opinions. A Yorkshire landowner, he turned his park into a sanctuary for animals and birds. As an explorer he learned to survive in the tropical rain forests of South America without a gun or the society of other white men. He was an authority on the poisons used by South American Indians and a taxidermist of note. The huge public that read his books included Dickens, Darwin and Roosevelt. Since his death the memory of Waterton's personal eccenticities has flourished, while the originality of his ideas and work has often suffered. Using his surviving papers, Julia Blackburn has redressed the balance in a biogr aphy that restores Waterton to his place as the first conservationist of the modern age.

Reviews

Julia Blackburn is an astute and gifted biographer...Her style is economical, and where appropriate graceful; always lucid, sometimes poetic, never gushing...Her book will intrigue and enthral

—— Spectator

Analytical, truthful and intimately personal... Throughout one learns considerably about the history of sharks, whales, professional divers, and other such creatures of the sea... Matthiessen is a most qualified observer of men and nature

—— Natural History

For its natural history, for its persistent courage and for its terrifying portrait of White Death, this book... will live in the memory of all who read it

—— Atlantic

Peter Matthiessen is beyond dispute the best nature writer working today

—— Peter Farb

A stirring account of a fascinating adventure

—— Sunday Tribune

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.

—— James Aldred, author of Goshawk Summer

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.

—— Country Life

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.

—— Literary Review

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

—— BBC Wildlife Magazine

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.

—— New Statesman

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.

—— Adam Nicolson, author of Life Between the Tides

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.

—— Caught by the River
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