Of Wolves and Men

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I read Of Wolves and Men the same year I read Lopez's Arctic Dreams; the latter was a gift from my mentor and teacher, a scholar of literacy who was also a lover of the environment. I understood in the process of reading these books that it is indeed a deeply complex thing to understand wolves, or young learners, as if they were One Thing. How we can know a thing—any thing—is complex and difficult work. BUT I think the overriding point of the books is an observation on how humans try and fail to find their place in the world. And connected to that, what “rights” do we have over the other animals of planet Earth? Of course “rights” in itself presuppose some law that has logical outlines on who can do what to whom. When I first read the script, I read all six episodes in a day – I just couldn’t put them down. As I was reading, I would be thinking “I really want to play that scene” and then I’d read the next one and think the same. When I got to episode five, I read this particular scene and I just instantly thought, “right, I’m in”. I’ve been looking to play a different kind of character and I just loved Molina’s journey. It’s been nice to do the comedy, stupidity and lightness of him. We do not know very much at all about animals. We cannot understand them except in terms of our own needs and experiences.” In one sense Of Wolves and Men is not really so much about wolves, rather wolves are the alien species Lopez uses to expose how Mankind tries to understand the world, and how fear and misunderstand and plain stupidity inform that understanding (or more accurately our mis-understanding)

The SONG IS ABOUT WILDNESS (OF WOLF AND MAN both). The song is well summated in the line "IN WILDNESS IS THE PRESERVATION OF THE WORLD".Barry Lopez has dedicated his incredible career as a writer and thinker to exploring the confluence of nature and culture. Most of his fiction explores the subject through the lens of individuals, scientists and shamans and aesthetes, historical figures and travelers. Most of his non-fiction is place based, though the focus ranges from cities to islands to the entire Arctic.

The broad stories he uses are Native American and more recent Eskimo view of wolves, Western folklore’s influence on our modern approach to wolves and some actual scientific information about wolves. A + E Networks UK is een mediabedrijf met een portfolio van eersteklas op feiten gebaseerde entertainmentkanalen. Het aanbod in de Benelux bestaat uit HISTORY Channel, HISTORY Channel HD en Crime + Investigation. De kanalen worden 24 uur per dag uitgezonden. Het bedrijf is een joint venture tussen Hearst en UK Sky en het heeft kanalen in bijna 100 landen, waaronder het Verenigd Koninkrijk, Scandinavië, de Benelux, Centraal- en Oost-Europa, Afrika en het Midden-Oosten.in the wolf we have not so much an animal that we have always known as one that we have consistently imagined.” We assume that the animal is entirely comprehensible and, as Henry Beston has said, has taken form on a plane beneath the one we occupy. It seems to me that this is a sure way to miss the animal and to see, instead, only another reflection of our own ideas.”

One of the biggest writing challenges of this series was balancing the two crime storylines, (both of which are rich with twists and turns – one of Mo Hayder’s specialities), with enough breathing room for characterisation. I’d like to think we succeeded in doing this, though, as evidenced by the stunning cast we got on board. The roles in this series are hugely demanding and every actor brought their A game. The section on the Middle Ages was a little disappointing, in that Lopez (not a medievalist) seems to buy into popular ideas that they were a uniquely depressing, oppressive, and ignorant time, caught between the lights of Rome and the modern era. He may be right about how medieval culture in general viewed the wolf, but I am less confident that he really understands the context of the time. Still, he wrote this in 1978, when his view was more standard, I believe, and frankly medievalists are still fighting against that perception. The section of the book certainly isn’t bad: there’s a lot of good research into medieval bestiaries and other texts, and overall Lopez’s conclusions about the medieval view of wolves do help me understand the attitudes of later eras, since they are so closely linked. Wolves are to me magical, revered, skillful, misunderstood, beautiful creatures. Which makes it all the more shameful that we, our shitty human species, has captured, ensnared, maimed, tortured, poisoned, slaughtered and almost completely decimated the wolf populations of the world over. What is the matter with us??????? Why are we so intent on grounding animal species into submission and degradation??????? An extraordinary book, one that I must highly recommend not only for anyone with an interest in wolves, but also for anyone interested in humanity’s complicated and often frustrating history with wildlife. The first section of the book, giving as complete a description of the wolf as is possible, is the most enjoyable to read, and will debunk many of the common misconceptions popular knowledge insists on. The following sections detail different aspects of how human civilizations have (mis)understood and treated wolves; these sections are harder to read because the content is more frequently tragic. However, they are no less important to read if one is to understand the state of wolves today.Barstensvol met buitengewone, vermakelijke en baanbrekende verhalen en personages: geïnspireerd door gisteren, vandaag geleefd, zet de toon voor morgen. HISTORY leeft! Nuvole all'orizzonte: qui analizziamo l'inserimento del lupo nei miti dei nativi americani, la sua origine e il suo significato simbolico. The people of hunting societies had immense respect for wolves, amazing animals that could survive long arctic winters without tools, clothing, or fires. Both wolves and humans were highly intelligent and social species who spent their lives living in a similar way, on the same land, pursuing the same prey. Wolves were natural predators. Their bodies were perfected for the hunting life by a million years of evolution. Humans were odd creatures, incapable of effective hunting without the use of a collection of clever technology. Eskimos periodically died of starvation, but wolves rarely did. We are ethnocentric, which is to say we view other ethnicities in the world in limiting ways, chiefly in terms of how we see things, and we are of course also human-centric: I was chatting to Megan during preparation and there are almost points where Honey gets so wrapped up in what he's doing that he could do something really dangerous and regret it. To get into all of that was a real joy.