Synopses & Reviews
Hailed conservationist Carl Safina examines animal personhood as told through the inspired narrative portraits of elephants, wolves, and dolphinsLong before his work as an ocean conservationist, Carl Safina's childhood by the long island shore launched a life-long passion for animals. Since then, his collected work has sought to inspire respect and improved understanding for wildlife. In his wise and passionate new book, Safina delves deeply into the lives of animals, witnessing their profound capacity for perception, thought, and emotion. Weaving observation with new understanding of brain functioning, his narrative erases many previously held distinctions between humans and other animals.
Who we are as individuals depends on who we are to others, and on who others are to us. Relationships define us. Certain non-humans, too, live lives focused around rich social relationships. If tragedy befalls key individuals, survivors confront lasting repercussions. Like us, these animals know who they are.
In Beyond Words, readers travel from Kenya to visit the Sheldrake elephant orphanage, to Yellowstone National Park to observe free-living wolves sorting out the aftermath of their personal tragedy, to the whales of Haro Strait off of Vancouver.
Safina delivers a graceful examination of how animals truly think and feel, which calls to question what really does—and should—make us human.
Synopsis
I wanted to know what they were experiencing, and why to us they feel so compelling, and so-close. This time I allowed myself to ask them the question that for a scientist was forbidden fruit: Who are you?
Weaving decades of field observations with exciting new discoveries about the brain, Carl Safina's landmark book offers an intimate view of animal behavior to challenge the fixed boundary between humans and nonhuman animals. In Beyond Words, readers travel to Amboseli National Park in the threatened landscape of Kenya and witness struggling elephant families work out how to survive poaching and drought, then to Yellowstone National Park to observe wolves sort out the aftermath of one pack's personal tragedy, and finally plunge into the astonishingly peaceful society of killer whales living in the crystalline waters of the Pacific Northwest.
Beyond Words brings forth powerful and illuminating insight into the unique personalities of animals through extraordinary stories of animal joy, grief, jealousy, anger, and love. The similarity between human and nonhuman consciousness, self-awareness, and empathy calls us to re-evaluate how we interact with animals. Wise, passionate, and eye-opening at every turn, Beyond Words is ultimately a graceful examination of humanity's place in the world.
About the Author
Carl Safina is author of six books, including
Song for the Blue Ocean, which was a
New York Times Notable Book of the Year,
Eye of the Albatross,
Voyage of the Turtle, and
The View From Lazy Point. Safina is founding president of Blue Ocean Institute at Stony Brook University, where he also co-chairs the University's Center for Communicating Science.
His work has also been featured in The New York Times, and National Geographic and a new Foreword to Rachel Carson's The Sea Around Us.