City Beasts: Fourteen Stories of Uninvited Wildlife

Author: Kurlansky, Mark

Color: Black

Edition: Illustrated

Format: Illustrated

Number Of Pages: 320

Details:

All-new stories about the urban worlds where animals and humans fight, love, and find common ground, from the nationally bestselling author of Cod and Salt.   In these stories, Mark Kurlansky journeys to his familiar haunts like New York’s Central Park or Miami’s Little Havana but with an original, earthy, and adventurous perspective. From baseball players in the Dominican Republic to Basque separatists in Spain to a restaurant owner in Cuba, from urban coyotes to a murder of crows, Kurlansky travels the worlds of animals and their human counterparts, revealing moving and hilarious truths about our connected existence.   In the end, he illuminates how closely our worlds are aligned, how humans really are beasts, susceptible to their basest instincts, their wildest dreams, and their artful survival.

Reviews:

Praise for Mark Kurlansky

“Mark Kurlansky's fiction provides the same pleasures we have come to expect from his nonfiction. It's beautifully written, observant, and acutely intelligent.” – Francine Prose

"Richly imagined stories." 

— O, the Oprah Magazine

“Brilliant… Journalistic skills might be part of a writer’s survival kit, but they infrequently prove to be the foundation for literary success, as they have here. …. Kurlansky has a wonderful ear for the syntax and rhythm of the vernacular… For all the seriousness of Kurlansky’s cultural entanglements, it is nevertheless a delight to experience his sophisticated sense of play and, at times, his outright wicked sense of humor.”

— The New York Times Book Review  

"For those of us who love both stories and food, this book is a delectable feast. Mark Kurlansky's sixteen-part novel is like a long, wonderful meal with friends. It is nurturing, succulent, and most of all, a lot of fun."

— Edwidge Danticat, author of 

Brother, I'm Dying and  Claire of the Sea  Light  

“Kurlansky powerfully demonstrates the defining role food plays in history and culture.”

— Atlanta Journal-Constitution  

“Kurlansky continues to prove himself remarkably adept as taking a most unlikely candidate and telling its tale with epic grandeur.”

— Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Kurlansky has a keen eye for odd facts and natural detail.”

— Wall Street Journal

About the Author:

Mark Kurlansky is the New York Times–bestselling author of many books, including Cod, Salt, 1968: The Year That Rocked the World, The Big Oyster, The Last Fish Tale, The Food of a Younger Land, The Eastern Stars, Ready for a Brand New Beat, and the short story collection, Edible Stories. He lives in New York City. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. ALSO BY MARK KURLANSKY   In time he understood that nature was not something outside the human world. The reverse is true. Nature is the real world, and humanity exists on islands within it. ODD BIRDS IN NEW YORK Some 6,000 years ago the people in Mesopotamia created the first written language. At first it was simple line drawings. They developed about 2,000 characters, all pictures of objects. After about 2,000 years the written language, now known as cuneiform, had developed into wedge-shaped symbols, dashes put together in different configurations. Each of these geometric characters represented an idea or often just a sound. Mesopotamian society revered the elite few who could write and read these texts, which were written on clay tablets. If these scribes were revered, birds were sacred animals because their feet left messages in clay that resembled cuneiform but were another language, one even the scribes could not read. Perhaps the messages were intended only for other birds. Far up in the northern regions of New York City, in a place known as the Bronx, in what was called a zoo, was a huge birdcage made of metal, wrought and twisted and crafted to perfection. In the cage lived some of the most beautiful birds in the world, including a bright green quetzal from Guatemala. The quetzal didn’t know that he was ori...

EAN: 9781594485879

Release Date: 03-02-2015

Languages: English

Item Note: Good shape with typical wear. Has a remainder mark. Paperback Used - Very Good Ships fast! 2015

Item Condition: UsedVeryGood

Binding: Paperback