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BELOVED BEASTS

Fighting for life in an age of extinction.

by Michelle Nijhuis ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 9, 2021

An engrossing history of conservation and its accomplishments.

A fine history of the genesis of the conservation movement.

Nijhuis, a project editor at the Atlantic and co-editor of The Science Writers’ Handbook , admits that the sixth extinction shows little sign of slackening, and people are still killing too many animals and destroying too much habitat. On the bright side, modern conservation movements have many victories to their credit—and even some political clout. The author delivers a vivid account of the movements’ past and present along with compelling minibiographies of the lives of many brilliant and energetic if not always admirable men and women. Without their work, there would be “no bison, no tigers, and no elephants; there would be few if any whales, wolves, or egrets.” Like many histories of the natural world, Nijhuis looks at Carl Linnaeus and Charles Darwin, but readers will encounter many other intriguing names and factoids. For example, who saved the first animal from extinction? William Hornaday, who almost single-handedly saved the bison and went on to become the director of the Bronx Zoo. Other lively characters populating this illuminating narrative include Rosalie Edge, who established the first reserve for birds of prey in 1934; and the well-known crusaders (Aldo Leopold, Julian Huxley, Rachel Carson) who converted environmentalism into a mass movement. The author concludes with a review of current efforts to preserve wildlife and wilderness, and she believes that in addition to ecological concerns, “conservationists need to pay a lot more attention to human complexity.” Despite progress in many areas, in 2019, “a global assessment by an international panel of biodiversity experts estimated that a million species were in danger of going extinct within decades—including as many as a quarter of all plant and animal species.” Compassionate yet realistic and candid throughout, Nijhuis makes a significant contribution to the literature on environmentalism.

Pub Date: March 9, 2021

ISBN: 978-1-324-00168-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Norton

Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2021

NATURE | SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY

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THE BACKYARD BIRD CHRONICLES

THE BACKYARD BIRD CHRONICLES

by Amy Tan ; illustrated by Amy Tan ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 23, 2024

An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.

A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.

In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“ Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression .” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”

Pub Date: April 23, 2024

ISBN: 9780593536131

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024

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New York Times Bestseller

by Walter Isaacson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 12, 2023

Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.

A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.

To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.

Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023

ISBN: 9781982181284

Page Count: 688

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS | SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY | ISSUES & CONTROVERSIES | POLITICS

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by Walter Isaacson with adapted by Sarah Durand

THE CODE BREAKER

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The Long History of Those Who Fought to Save the Animals

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By Ernest Freeberg

  • April 14, 2021

BELOVED BEASTS Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction By Michelle Nijhuis

A recent study warns that 500 species of land animals face extinction over the next two decades, while another predicts that climate change may wipe out a third of the world’s variety of freshwater fish. As Michelle Nijhuis writes in “Beloved Beasts,” news of this existential threat reaches most of us as “a jumble of tragedies and emergencies.” Through a series of richly drawn biographical portraits, she introduces us to the men and women who have been working for more than a century to rescue endangered species from extinction. They are a sometimes flawed but fascinating group — sportsmen, bird lovers, zoologists and activists. Without their efforts, our bad situation would be so much worse.

While some early naturalists found evidence in the fossil record of animals becoming extinct, until the 19th century most observers considered extinction a physical and even theological impossibility. Overhunting and extermination campaigns had clearly caused micro-extinctions, and there were animal populations that scattered before the advance of human settlement. But the destruction of an entire species was unthinkable, a smashed window in the mansion of God’s perfect design.

By the mid-19th century, however, humanity’s power to vandalize creation could no longer be denied, nowhere more clearly than in the decimation of America’s vast bison herds. In 1874, Congress tried to curb this slaughter, but President Grant vetoed the bill, supporting the military strategy of pacifying the Plains tribes by destroying this foundation of their economy and culture.

A decade later, when the Smithsonian zoologist and chief taxidermist William Temple Hornaday surveyed the museum’s collection he found no good examples of the American bison. While he was planning an expedition to harvest specimens, his Western correspondents informed him there were only a few hundred left, and they were disappearing fast. After weeks of searching in the Montana Territory, Hornaday found and shot 20 of them. “I am really ashamed to confess it,” he later admitted. By his estimation, he had just killed a tenth of all the bison remaining from the herds that had once numbered from 20 million to 30 million.

Hornaday’s skill as a taxidermist meant he spent “much of his professional life up to his elbows in animal innards.” Back in Washington, he mounted these sacrificial victims in a diorama that evoked the bison’s life on the prairies. The display fascinated the public and rallied support for his fresh determination to save what remained of the wild herds. Thanks to a successful breeding program he created at the Bronx Zoo, a small herd of bison produced enough offspring to repopulate Western reserves, a saving remnant that would expand over time and is still thriving today.

Hornaday’s success gave hope that extinction was not inevitable for those species being ground under the wheels of progress. He devoted decades more to the cause, adding his prestige to the “feather wars.” In 1886, an ornithologist walking on New York City’s sidewalks found fastened on ladies’ hats the brilliant fragments of 40 different species. From hummingbirds to herons, millions died serving this market, pushing many species down the passenger pigeon’s road to extinction.

The National Audubon Society, incorporated in 1905, won federal protections that ended the plume trade and provided sanctuary for songbirds. But along the way, the campaign exposed a gendered double standard. Though many of conservation’s most loyal supporters were women, bird advocates blamed the female of our species for their heedless vanity, even though the trade’s profits went to male hunters and milliners. In turn, those defending the free market in feathers ridiculed all conservationists as effeminate sentimentalists.

That charge was hard to sustain against Rosalie Edge, the conservation movement’s “hellcat.” Edge came to the cause in middle age, an affluent and well-connected amateur bird-watcher who had developed political skills fighting for woman’s suffrage. Though a loyal Audubon member, she ambushed the society’s annual board meeting in 1929, denouncing its leading men for failing to protest the open season against eagles, owls and other raptors. To many sportsmen and poultry farmers, eagles were undesirable vermin, and Alaska even offered a bounty on them.

In partnership with a respected zoologist who shared her views but not her freedom to agitate, Edge founded the Emergency Conservation Committee. “Mrs. Edge takes the view that all conservation movements except her own are limited and discriminatory,” The New Yorker quipped years later, “and she puts in her best licks for creatures that many naturalists wouldn’t touch with a 10-foot pole.” A passionate pamphleteer and an incorrigible lobbyist, her protests helped change Audubon’s leadership and its policy on birds of prey. In 1934, Edge learned of a mountain in Pennsylvania that was a favorite spot for hunters to shoot raptors. Horrified, she bought the mountain, hired a caretaker, and transformed Hawk Mountain into a preserve that continues her legacy today.

Among the visitors to this sanctuary was the wildlife biologist Rachel Carson. There she found evidence of a precipitous decline in the annual eagle migration, one clue in a puzzle she assembled in her groundbreaking 1962 book, “Silent Spring.” Carson showed that pesticides were doing more damage than an army of hunters, not only driving eagles toward extinction but poisoning creatures up and down the food chain, humans included. Her work inspired Stewart Udall, interior secretary in the Johnson administration, to push for legal protections that culminated in the landmark 1973 Endangered Species Act, an imperfect but “indispensable bulwark against extinction.”

Tracing key turning points in the development of conservation biology, Nijhuis shows that the growing threat of extinction provoked an intellectual revolution in the way scientists think about the very meaning of species . Each animal came to be understood as an essential piece of a dynamic, interconnected web. While public sympathy is easily stirred to rescue “charismatic” animals, conservationists came to focus as much on the preservation of habitat. No longer just protecting animals from bullets, they expanded their mission to save “shrubbery and wetlands from bulldozers.” As the conservation pioneer Aldo Leopold put it, the only way to stop extinction is to first save the organism he called “land.”

Leopold preached the essential value that apex predators play in keeping ecosystems healthy, while others joined his pioneering efforts to preserve wilderness. In the 1980s, E. O. Wilson captured the evolving insights of ecological science by framing extinction as an assault on “biodiversity,” a loss of genetic possibility that threatens all life, humans included. Others worked to overcome the conservation movement’s origin in white supremacy and European colonialism. Africa’s first game-protection measures were imposed by colonial masters determined to protect their sport of trophy hunting. More recently, transnational organizations have defended wildlife by supporting African communities as stewards of their own environmental inheritance, a strategy both more just and more successful.

Nijhuis is an engaging storyteller as well as a self-described “lapsed biologist,” weaving this history with firsthand accounts of those on the front lines of species preservation today — from the Blackfeet tribe’s restoration of a bison herd in the Northern Rockies (descendants of Hornaday’s rescue operation), to park rangers in Namibia who defend rhinos and elephants from poachers. She acknowledges that her story offers no reason for great optimism concerning the fate of so many species now facing extinction, but she reminds us of the very real accomplishments of these “passionate experts and passionate amateurs” who devoted their lives, and too often gave their lives, to protecting our fellow species from ourselves.

Ernest Freeberg is a professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and the author of “A Traitor to His Species: Henry Bergh and the Birth of the Animal Rights Movement.”

BELOVED BEASTS Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction By Michelle Nijhuis Illustrated. 342 pp. W.W. Norton & Company. $27.95.

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Beloved Beasts unwinds a history of human efforts to protect the loss of other species.

‘Beloved Beasts’ Is a Riveting History of Conservation

A new book by the acclaimed science journalist Michelle Nijhuis looks at human attempts to save other species from extinction, from John Muir to the World Wildlife Fund

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In physics, the Doppler effect describes how a noise like a coming train will always sound different when it approaches than when it recedes. The noise itself is the same, but your perspective changes, and with it, the pitch enters a new frequency. Reading about history can ignite a similar feeling, showing how, say, social battles that once seemed futile were actually progressing all along. Such is the case with Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction , a new book by former biologist and acclaimed science journalist and editor Michelle Nijhuis. Beloved Beasts unwinds a history of human efforts to protect the loss of other species, an impulse, Nijhuis writes, “likely as old as the images of steppe bison painted on cave walls.” She reveals how policies and habits that once seemed unmovable were, through the intervention of passionate human advocates, changed. “Fantasy and despair are tempting, but history can help us resist them,” she writes. “The past accomplishments of conservation were not inevitable, and neither are its future failures.”

Beloved Beasts is a capacious, engrossing, and timely examination of worldwide conservation movements since the late 19th century, tracing not just their triumphs but the tendrils of racism and colonialism that have all too often undergirded the science. Beginning with the plight of bison in the American West , the book moves chronologically through turning points in species conservation, with each chapter tethered to an actor or two and the animals they were—or are still—working to protect. This structure is surprisingly buoying, not just because it’s more fun to follow people than policies, but because it’s evidence of just how many ripples one life can make. Aldo Leopold described conservation as a movement of individuals, each “a member of a community of interdependent parts,” and the book attains a similar patchwork of viewpoints and priorities, while never succumbing to the myth that change stems from one voice alone.

Conservation history, Nijhuis writes, is “full of people who did the wrong things for the right reasons, and the right things for the wrong reasons,” and her portraits of these movers and shakers are multifaceted. John Muir’s ecstatic meditations on the natural world may have become “part of conservation scripture,” but when he came across a group of Mono people while hiking in the Sierra Nevada, he wrote that they “ha[d] no right place in the landscape.” This ethos  reverberated through the 20th-century creation of national parks in Africa, which were initially spearheaded by colonial governments and which evicted nomadic inhabitants as “squatters” in order to create a definition of “wilderness” palatable to foreign safari-goers.

Human control over wild animals has long been a way of exerting dominance over the animals’ habitat, the same habitat, of course, that we rely on too. Nijhuis describes President Ulysses S. Grant’s interior secretary, Columbus Delano, believing that the decimation of American bison populations would, in his words, “confine the Indians to smaller areas, and compel them to abandon their nomadic customs”—paving the way, implicitly, for white men to dominate the landscape. 

beloved beasts book review

Beloved Beasts also   details the rise of well-known organizations like the World Wildlife Fund , which was launched in 1961 by a few dozen British naturalists, most of them male and white. One of them was author Aldous Huxley ’s brother Julian, an adventurous biologist whose three-month, Unesco-funded trip through Central and East Africa had just been chronicled in a series of newspaper articles published in the London Observer.  As would happen a year later in the U.S. with Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring , Huxley’s writing won the hearts and minds of those with power and pocketbooks; the WWF formed as a fundraising machine in the wake of his publication. (As for the WWF panda mascot? It was sketched during an early planning meeting, chosen because it was cute, threatened globally, and its black-and-white fur would be cheap to print.)

Meanwhile, Nijhuis’s account of the “crisis discipline” of conservation biology that emerged in the 1970s—the concept that the field needed to move urgently to address environmental threats—is enriched by her own account of knowing one of its earliest advocates, biologist Michael Soulé , who was her neighbor in the foothills of the western Colorado Rockies decades later. “What really bothered him, he often said, was not the prospect of death but that of the end of birth—the end of evolution, the end of possibility,” she writes.

In addition to covering these central movements, Nijhuis describes battles I knew little about, from the bird-watching suffragists who fought feathered fashion at the turn of the 20th century, to the Maori who successfully classified the longest navigable river in New Zealand as a legal person in 2017, to the Namibian conservationists currently reliant on budgets funded by trophy hunters. Though at times I hoped she would cover more of these smaller-scale conservation efforts—perhaps shedding a light on the Nez Perce spearheading wolf reintroduction in Idaho  or the Indigenous communities in Myanmar fighting for ownership over the scientific data collected about fish in their rivers—the book seems to me successful if, after reading Nijhuis’s history, readers are left wanting to hunt down more.

Nijhuis is the sort of writer who makes excavating arcane facts and dinner-party-worthy anecdotes look effortless. I often found myself shouting to my boyfriend in the other room, compelled to share, for example, that a species of Slovenian cave beetle was now nearly extinct because its scientific name ( A. hitleri ) had made it a neo-Nazi collector’s item. Her eye knows just where to linger when she’s in the field, as with her description of watching a rhino in the sparse, spiky shade of a mopani tree as he “worked his droopy upper lip … vast haunches jiggling as he disappeared into the sun-bleached brush.” Even accounts of committee meetings—one with 1920s Audubon members, another with contemporary seminomadic Namibian herders—had my heart pounding, tickled to be so immersed in bureaucratic Ping-Pong.

Nijhuis is the sort of writer who makes excavating arcane facts and dinner-party-worthy anecdotes look effortless.

I would have marveled at the scope of Nijhuis’s research in any moment, but the book feels particularly timely now. In late January, President Biden announced an unprecedented plan to conserve 30 percent of the United States’ lands and waters by 2030 as part of his day-one executive order on climate. In practice, this will mean more than doubling the area of currently protected land held by both private and public parties—adding an area twice the size of Texas —with no obvious path for which land should be targeted first. Scientists talk about “ unnatural selection ,” where an animal’s chance for survival depends on how “useful” we see it, and Beloved Beasts made me consider the value we assign not only to animals but to their—to our—habitats, often prioritizing the conservation of the landscapes we most want to recreate in. The scope of Biden’s plan would require transcending those sorts of calculations. In the 1990s, Soulé was one of the first biologists to suggest that we should be building “habitat corridors” between natural reserves, creating pathways for animals to migrate and move across the whole continent, from Canada to Mexico. Proposals of this nature have traditionally been a tough sell, but Biden has created an opening to discuss the preservation of habitat connectivity once again. 

When humans invented agriculture around 8,000 B.C., we were outnumbered by many other primates , including baboons. Ten thousand years later, we rule the earth, and it’s the animals around us that keep disappearing, at a rate of about 9,000 human-caused species extinctions every year. The idea that we are entering a sixth mass extinction now is well-documented. Biologist Paul Ehrlich tells Nijhuis that though the scale of species extinctions is already sobering, it doesn’t capture how many more local animal populations are declining or going extinct even as their species holds on. In her 2016 book Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species , Ursula Heise asks, “Is it possible to acknowledge the realities of large-scale species extinction and yet to move beyond mourning, melancholia, and nostalgia to a more affirmative vision of our biological future?”

After reading Beloved Beasts , I am confident the answer is yes. Nijhuis defines the mission of conservation biology as “the preservation of possibility,” but in her introduction, she explains that she will use the word hope  sparingly, because the emotion did not motivate many early conservationists. They were swayed by other things (“love, outrage, data”), but they did not persevere because they felt they would succeed at saving the animals they loved—they just felt it was worth doing regardless. So I was surprised, on closing the book, to feel that rare flutter: hope. It wasn’t that I now believed humans could save every animal, but that in owning up to the harmful rhetoric within conservation’s lineage, and acknowledging the persistence of colonial and racist environmental policies, we will be able to collaborate more efficiently and more equitably. As Nijhuis suggests, to cultivate habitat for other animals, we must find connectivity in our own communities first. 

Though a conservation biologist will emphasize the similarities between humans and other animals, Nijhuis notes that Homo sapiens are the only ones aware of ourselves as a species, capable of identifying and acting as part of a larger “we.” “The assumption that only particular kinds of humans are distinctive—that a subset of the ‘we’ is different from other animals, but ‘they’ are not—underlies some of the darkest chapters of the conservation movement,” writes Nijhuis toward the end of the book. We need a future built on multispecies solidarity, she writes, and an awareness that we are all in it together on this warming planet. Humans can destroy, but so can we protect, conserve, rebuild. We must not forget we are “capable of protecting the rest of life from ourselves.”

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Book Review: Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction by Michelle Nijhuis

beloved beasts book review

Beloved Beasts is a richly informative history of the international conservation movement and the central figures who have played crucial roles in developing conservationism and moving conservation efforts forward. The book is also about the ongoing debates, both philosophical and pragmatic, about “humanity’s proper place on earth” (3). Written by Michelle Nijhuis, an award-winning environmental and science journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times , The Atlantic , and Scientific American , among other publications, Beloved Beasts is meticulously researched, drawing upon a wide range of primary source documents, while also remaining accessible to even novice readers on conservation. Its fast-paced chapters are broken down into short, readable chunks interspersed with black-and-white photographs.

Exploring the conservation movement from cultural, political, social, economic, and historical perspectives, Beloved Beasts also interrogates conservation’s academic origins, tracing the development of the fields of ecology and conservation biology in scientific and academic contexts. The very term “ecology,” Nijhuis notes, is only about one hundred years old, indicating how nascent our burgeoning understanding of the interconnectedness of all living things still is.  Nijhuis also discusses how other academic as well as historical developments—from the creation of taxonomy, to the invention of DDT, to the end of World War II—helped give rise to newly developing notions of ecology, conservation, and environmentalism.

The ten chapters of Beloved Beasts introduce readers to a surprisingly wide range of people, places, and projects. Nijhuis explains how conservation sites, groups, and laws such as the Smithsonian National Zoo, the World Wildlife Fund, the Environmental Defense Fund, and the US Endangered Species Act were created and implemented, as well as how they were championed and resisted.  Readers also learn about the myriad and complex roles that both human individuals and animal species have played in conservation history: Theodore Roosevelt, William Temple Hornaday, Rosalie Edge, Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, Stewart Udall, and Elinor Ostrom all have important roles in this story, but so, too, do the American bison, the whooping crane, the rhinoceroses of Namibia, and the bluehead chub. The last of these, a small fish whose nests help to support and sustain life for numerous other species in the bodies of water they occupy, serves as a useful reminder of one of the key points made throughout Beloved Beasts , which is that the conservation movement is—or at least, should be—not just about “colorful birds or large, showy mammals,” but also “the tiny, the unknown, the stationary, and even the despised—and, importantly, the relationships among them all.”

beloved beasts book review

Though it has lofty aims, including, at its best, the conservation of all creatures great and small, the conservation movement has been mired by difficult questions and debates, corrupt motives, and complex disagreements among competing parties about what to conserve and how to conserve it. Beloved Beasts compellingly traces how the conservation movement has long been intertwined with, and in some cases directly born from, political agendas based upon maintaining colonial power, white supremacy, American exceptionalism, and traditional notions of robust masculinity. Even eugenics has found its way into the conservation movement over the decades.  As such, Beloved Beasts also uses the history of conservation to tell a cautionary tale, reminding us that all too often, efforts to conserve species have had as much to do with maintaining power—over other human beings, other animals, and the land—as with protecting life. 

Yet, even as this book highlights the ways in which human greed and corruption have shaped both the need for and the development of the conservation movement, Nijhuis nonetheless calls for more attention to human complexity—both how humans can corrupt and how they can restore —in order to move conservation efforts forward. She argues that conservation science should involve not just scientists, but also social scientists, economists, historians, political scientists, and ordinary citizens.  Emphasizing the importance of what biologist Dave Ehrenfeld described as “that turbulent and vital area where biology meets the social sciences and humanities,” Nijhuis writes that we cannot “stud[y] plants and animals as if they could be isolated from politics and other human concerns.” She also emphasizes the importance of human compassion for other species as critical to conservation work, writing that “our emotional bonds with other species and their members” are “fundamental to conservation.”  In other words, Beloved Beasts acknowledges that humans are as capable of goodwill, benevolence, and restoration as they are of greed, corruption, and destruction; it is the former set of qualities, Nijhuis writes, which must be harnessed and capitalized upon if conservationists are to successfully get humans to invest more fully in the work of conserving species other than our own.

Nijhuis urges readers to recognize that conservation efforts, however imperfect or flawed they may be, do have the potential to stave off extinctions and population declines—but she also insists that conservation work cannot be done only as emergency or crisis work. When we focus on conserving species, land, and resources that are on the brink of extinction or mass decline, our efforts at conservation are already far too late. Instead, Nijhuis suggests that today’s conservationists ought to heed the advice of early-twentienth-century conservationist Willard Van Name, who warned that “the time to protect a species is while it is still common.”

Our currently existing protections—at local, national, and international levels, in the forms of laws, treaties, and international agreements—while important, are, Nijhuis argues, still not enough to keep common species common or to stave off the sixth mass extinction. As she puts it, “[even] the most powerful species-protection law in the world is not powerful enough to fully protect other species from ourselves.”  Beloved Beasts is not only a history of the conservation movement, then, but also a call to action: an insistence that we all do more to fight for life in an age of extinction.

Melissa Dennihy

Melissa Dennihy, Ph.D., is an English professor at Queensborough Community College of the City University of New York, where her work focuses in part on ecofiction and environmental humanities. You can find her on Twitter, where she’s often tweeting about books: @MelissaDennihy.

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I just watched the Netflix documentary Seaspiracy. It’s a gloomy assessment of the human effect on the condition and health of our oceans and the organisms that inhabit the seas and a while back there was David Attenborough’s gloomy assessment of the human effect on wildlife in general: A Life On Our Planet. Both try at the end of these documentaries to apply a positive spin and I shake my head. I’ve been processing the dilemma we face but four conditions get in the way every time I think about it: our consumptive lifestyles, education, population and politics.

Also back in the early seventies, there were books like Rachael Carson’s Silent Spring, Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb and others that alerted me/us to the human impact on the planet. During my entire adult life there were these warnings that we had to do something and things were done but there is always pushback…always. How do you prevent the pushback?

I would add that a major danger to nature is that in much of the world, including the United States, the human population is exploding. Before it’s presumed peak, later this century, the world will add ~2.5 billion–the number that were alive during the Eisenhower Administration–this at a time when humans have coopted ~40% of arable land to feed ourselves, and when the combined mass of humans and livestock is equal to 96% of mammalian biomass, according to a study in PNAS. Humans have reduced the world’s plant biomass by half.

All this greatly reduces ecosystem services, on which we all depend. Oddly, especially at a time when Pew projects the US population will grow by more than 100 million over the next 50 years (equivalent to five New York States), leaders of US environmental groups don’t seem to think that overpopulation is a problem in the United States, even if it is elsewhere. Yet, like in much of the rest of the world, our vertebrate populations have plummeted by ~75% over the last 50 years, as have our insect populations.

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A group of school children in 1899 viewing the first bison at the National Zoological Park.

Book Review: An Open-Eyed History of Wildlife Conservation

Michelle nijhuis traces the evolution of modern efforts to protect threatened species in “beloved beasts.”.

Top: A group of school children in 1899 viewing the first bison at the National Zoological Park. Visual: Frances Benjamin Johnston / Smithsonian Archives

T oday’s conservationists are taxed with protecting the living embodiments of tens of millions of years of nature’s creation, and they face unprecedented challenges for doing so — from climate change and habitat destruction to pollution and unsustainable wildlife trade. Given that extinction is the price for failure, there’s little forgiveness for error. Success requires balancing not just the complexities of species and habitats, but also of people and politics. With an estimated 1 million species now threatened with extinction, conservationists need all the help they can get.

Yet the past — a key repository of lessons hard learned through trial and error — is all too often forgotten or overlooked by conservation practitioners today. In “ Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction ,” journalist Michelle Nijhuis shows that history can help contextualize and guide modern conservation. Indeed, arguably it’s only in the last 200 years or so that a few scattered individuals began thinking seriously about the need to save species — and it’s only in the last 50 that conservation biology even emerged as a distinct field.

beloved beasts book review

BOOK REVIEW — “Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction,” by Michelle Nijhuis (W. W. Norton & Company, 352 pages).

“Beloved Beasts” reads as a who’s who and greatest-moments survey of these developmental decades. Through the eyes and actions of individuals, it portrays the evolution of the surprisingly young field from a pursuit almost solely of the privileged Western elite to “a movement that is shaped by many people, many places, and many species.”

It’s in the gray area of the personal, though, that the book is most fascinating. Even the most celebrated and successful conservationists had human flaws, and Nijhuis does not shy away from these details. As she writes, “The story of modern species conservation is full of people who did the wrong things for the right reasons, and the right things for the wrong reasons.”

In one chapter, for example, Nijhuis tells the story of William Temple Hornaday, an American taxidermist who served as the first director of what is now the Bronx Zoo, and who is credited with saving the American bison from extinction. By the late 19th century, evidence clearly pointed to the fact that bison, a species that once numbered tens of million, were set to disappear due to wanton overhunting. Yet at the time, most people assumed that “species were static and enduring,” Nijhuis writes, and those who did catch wind of the fall of the American buffalo mostly responded with a shrug.

Strangely for his time, Hornaday became obsessed with the animal’s plight. He decided that the only way to preserve the species from extinction was to establish a captive herd to, as he wrote, “atone for the national disgrace that attaches to the heartless and senseless extermination of the species in the wild state.” With Theodore Roosevelt’s backing, Hornaday established a small bison herd in the Bronx in 1905, one whose urban descendants became founders of some of the 500,000 bison that survive today. More than just save a species, Hornaday’s work helped bring public recognition of extinction as a “needless tragedy” rather than an inevitable cost of expansion, Nijhuis writes.

Yet despite all the good he did for the natural world, Nijhuis points out that Hornaday’s successes — like many conservation gains of the 19th and 20th centuries — were built on a foundation of nationalism, sexism, and racism. “For Hornaday and his allies, the rescue of the bison had nothing to do with the people who had depended on the species — and a great deal to do with their own illusions about themselves,” Nijhuis writes.

“The story of modern species conservation is full of people who did the wrong things for the right reasons, and the right things for the wrong reasons.”

Bison were slaughtered en masse in the 1800s, not just for their hides but also “as a convenient way to control” Native Americans who depended on the animals for food, Nijhuis writes. At the same time, White men like Hornaday and Roosevelt began appropriating bison as a symbol of rugged Caucasian masculinity, both for the animals’ association with a “strenuous life” and as the target of choice for of wealthy White male hunters. Despite evidence to the contrary, Hornaday placed partial blame for the bison’s demise on Native Americans, and his Bronx-raised bison, Nijhuis points out, were released on land seized from the Apache, Comanche, and Kiowa. Protecting bison, therefore, meant protecting “a perniciously exclusive version of natural progress,” Nijhuis writes.

With each subsequent generation, though, the conservation field has gradually improved in terms of its scope and ethics. In his older age, Hornaday, for example, supported and encouraged the activism and ecological education of Rosalie Edge. A bird-loving New York socialite, Edge helped to reform the Audubon Society, which, at the time, supported the eradication of raptors and opposed tightening of hunting restrictions.

A year before the term “ecosystem” was coined in 1934, Edge discussed with Hornaday a groundbreaking realization she had come to: that species should be protected not only because they are of interest to humans — as had motivated Hornaday and the men of his time — but because each forms a vital link in a living chain. A decade after Edge and Hornaday’s conversation, the centrality and fragility of ecological connections would become all the more apparent when Rachel Carson pondered the impacts of the pesticide DDT on raptors at the Hawk Mountain Sanctuary in Pennsylvania, a protected area Edge founded.

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Ideas and connections continued to build. Around the same time Edge was campaigning for birds, Aldo Leopold popularized the idea that ecosystems, not just species, need to be protected, and that game is a public trust that should be managed by science-based law. This zeitgeist shift resulted in the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation. Leopold “believed it was possible to love other species and use them wisely, too,” Nijhuis writes.

The conservation movement gained momentum in the wake of World War II, Nijhuis writes, when the word “global” came into wider use, and the interconnectedness of the world — both ecological and human — became glaringly apparent. Data compiled by the newly established International Union for Conservation of Nature also revealed just how many species faced extinction, and shifted the movement’s focus to emergency relief. But as conservation spread to other continents, especially Africa, it continued to work through various growing pains, including racist views about independent Africa’s inability to manage its own natural resources. “Many foreign conservationists saw the African landscape as John Muir had seen Yosemite — as an extraordinary place meant to be visited, not lived in,” Nijhuis writes.

This so-called fortress conservation approach perpetuated in the 1950s and 1960s — a top-down enterprise in which global authorities ultimately inform national and local agendas — has since come under fire and has been increasingly replaced by a version of conservation that acknowledges that humans are an inextricable part of the landscape. Additionally, time and time again, conservationists have learned (oftentimes the hard way) that protection of wild places can never succeed without buy-in from the people who live there. “To protect biodiversity — to provide other species with the resources they needed to adapt, survive, and thrive — conservationists, including conservation biologists, had to persuade some of their fellow humans to make some sacrifices, at least in the short term,” Nijhuis writes.

Hornaday’s successes — like many conservation gains of the 19th and 20th centuries — were built on a foundation of nationalism, sexism, and racism.

The problem, Nijhuis continues, “isn’t inattention to human needs, but inattention to human complexity.” Conservationists too often view humanity the same way they would a population of species that fits into a single ecological niche with set relationships and dependencies, Nijhuis argues, rather than as thinking and technologically endowed beings aware of our place among other species and each other. Nor are we passive players. “As the future perfect turns into the present perfect, we can apply ourselves to creating a tolerable present and future — for ourselves and for the rest of life,” Nijhuis writes.

The decisions we make are often unpredictable, though, informed by a vast array of social, cultural, and individual factors. “Conservation biology, in other words, can’t be left only to the biologists,” Nijhuis writes. It’s for this reason that the field has begun to draw upon other realms of expertise outside of pure ecology, including economics, politics, social science, and more. This need for diversity — not only in nature but also within human endeavors to protect it — is something that Leopold and others recognized decades ago, but has only just started to come to fruition in any practical way.

History is an integral part of that complexity, too. Just as we cannot protect something that we do not know exists, past failures and successes likewise cannot be taken advantage of for future gains if history is forgotten. “Beloved Beasts” is therefore compelling and necessary reading for anyone interested in the field of conservation. As Nijhuis writes, “We can move forward by understanding the story of struggle and survival we already have — and seeing the possibilities in what remains to be written.”

Book Review: Beloved Beasts—Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction

Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction Michelle Nijhuis. 2021. W.W. Norton & Company. Hardcover, 342 pages, with b&w illustrations, acknowledgments, notes, further reading list and index. ISBN 978-1-324-00168-3

No, it’s not a species-by-species rundown of endangered animals—the beloved beasts that (some) humans are fighting to save. Instead, the book is about the humans themselves, the heroes of conservation who are behind the saving, and what they accomplished: From Carl Linnaeus, in 1729 (we can’t protect something until we define it), to Emmanuel Frimpong, current day.

You’ve never heard of Emmanuel Frimpong? From Ghana? For 10 years, he has been observing bluehead chub, mountain redbelly dace and eight other colorful species of small freshwater fish in Toms Creek, a trickle of water that flows through a public park in the state of Virginia. Frimpong belongs to the Fish and Wildlife Conservation faculty at Virginia Polytechnic Institute; as a newcomer on a tight budget, he began studying the chub and their co-inhabitants because they were abundant and right there.

Although they’re hardly charismatic and of no direct interest to the anglers who annually contribute millions of dollars to conservation across the US, these overlooked fish captivated Frimpong because of their spawning behavior. They share their nests across species and cooperatively protect them and keep them free of suffocating silt: “A single nest can be surrounded by hundreds of fish—a motley school ranging from pale blue and pink to brilliant yellow and red.”

As opposed to elephants, tigers, condors and the other apex species that get so much of our attention (and funding), these fish live near the bottom of their ecological heaps—mere food for larger fish, birds, mammals and, finally, for microorganisms. But they contribute to the intricate workings of their ecosystem in ways that Frimpong and his students are teasing out. What effects do these “insignificant” fish have on aquatic vegetation and insect life, or on the makeup of the stream bed itself?

As the author notes, these fish aren’t insignificant at all; they are emblematic: “The larger project of conservation—that of protecting the relationships that support all life on earth—can’t be accomplished with emergency measures alone. It has to start with common species.”

Thus Emmanuel Frimpong’s work isn’t insignificant either. In this context, he belongs at the close of Beloved Beasts as much as Linnaeus does at the beginning. Inbetween, Nijhuis hits critical turning points in modern conservation via the people who initiated them:

William T. Hornaday, the taxidermist who in 1886 “collected” 21 of the American West’s last bison for a diorama at the US National Museum, now the Smithsonian Institution. Although it wasn’t Hornaday’s intent, his work became an example of saving animals (a species, that is) by killing them (individuals, that is)—a troublesome contradiction that lies at the root of today’s furor over hunting. When it opened, in 1888, Hornaday’s bison exhibit became a sensation and focused attention on extinction as not only a threat, but also something that might be thwarted.

Other heroes: Rosalie (Mrs. Charles Noel) Edge, the Manhattan socialite, suffragist, birder and scourge of the National Association of Audubon Societies, which as late as 1929 was still condoning the killing of raptors on behalf of gamebirds. This was in the aftermath of the mass harvesting of birds for their plumage for ladies’ hats, which spurred Pres. Theodore Roosevelt to set aside Pelican Island, in Florida, as that nation’s first bird sanctuary, which in turn led to the US National Wildlife Refuge System. In 1934, Rosalie Edge acquired an exposed ridgetop in eastern Pennsylvania where migrating raptors were being shot by the thousands—today, the internationally famous Hawk Mountain Sanctuary that has helped train many ornithologists.

In Wisconsin, Aldo Leopold, the forester, early environmental scientist and “dangerously eloquent” author of A Sand County Almanac . Followed by Julian Huxley, the trail-breaking British evolutionary biologist whose grandfather, T.H. Huxley, had been so vociferous in his defense of evolution that he became known as “Darwin’s bulldog.” Rachel Carson, the marine scientist whose 1962 exposé of DDT was first serialized in The New Yorker and then became a best-selling book called Silent Spring . Michael Soulé, who—at an outdoor dinner in 1978 in the San Diego Zoo’s Safari Park—proposed a new field of study called conservation biology. Garth Owen-Smith, the sparkplug of Namibia’s renowned community-conservancy program ( eulogized in CFL in July 2020).

Some of these heroes knew each other and worked together; all of them built on their predecessors’ efforts. Beloved Beasts makes it clear that no one operates in a vacuum. In turn, the book’s subjects impacted other effective people also, from Theodore Roosevelt and John Muir to Stewart Udall, John F. Kennedy, Winston Churchill, Paul Ehrlich, E.O. Wilson and many more, including ultimately the voter on the street. Their work led to the National Park System, the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act, all in the US, and countless global steps along conservation’s wobbly path such as the founding of the IUCN, the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Conservation is not just a scientific endeavor, it is a political and social process that requires broad, deep and active support from non-scientists.

This is a rousing and opportune book written by a pro who knows the value of research. Her explanations of the timeliness of important ideas make us wonder: Who’s next? Who can turn us away from the destruction that seems to be overtaking our Earth?

Silvio Calabi has been a journalist, author, editor and publisher for 45 years, most recently with Conservation Frontlines . He lives on the coast of Maine and in the mountains of Colorado.

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Extinction isn’t inevitable. ‘Beloved Beasts’ explains why.

Past efforts to prevent extinction took a species-by-species approach. But now a more comprehensive plan is needed that looks at interconnections.  

stack of books

  • By Michael Berry Correspondent

April 13, 2021

Without the efforts of conservationists, the world would have no bald eagles, black rhinos, or whooping cranes. But it’s not enough any longer to focus on saving individual species, writes Michelle Nijhuis in her new history of conservation, “Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction.” With an estimated 1 million species threatened with extinction, society cannot afford to view animals – including humans – in isolation. 

Instead, Nijhuis explains that the cutting edge of conservation biology prioritizes connectivity. “To dismiss our complexity, our ability to be both constructive and destructive, is to give up on the whole project of species conservation and, indeed, on the human project itself,” she writes.

A lively, mostly chronological history of ideas extending from 18th-century botanist and taxonomist Carl Linnaeus to modern- day biochemist Jennifer Doudna, “Beloved Beasts” spotlights a variety of conservationists, environmentalists, and ecologists. Figures both famous (Rachel Carson and Theodore Roosevelt) and less widely known (Rosalie Edge and Julian Huxley) offer sometimes conflicting opinions of how best to treat animals on the verge of vanishing.

Nijhuis devotes a chapter to the forester, wildlife manager, and author Aldo Leopold, who originally advocated for wolf extermination but made an about-face after witnessing the sad results of deer overpopulation. She also highlights the work of Carson and writes about the publication of her seminal 1962 book, “Silent Spring,” which eventually led to the banning of the pesticide DDT and the rehabilitation of the bald eagle.

What “Beloved Beasts” also makes clear is that agreement even between like-minded individuals is difficult. For example, when contemporary conservationists from the West arrive in Africa, their actions to save animals can come at a high cost to local farmers. Nijhuis acknowledges that “in many cases – and all parts of the world – the poor carry the burdens of conservation, while the wealthy enjoy most of the ecosystem services.” She writes about Garth Owen-Smith, a South African pioneer of community-based conservancy who has worked with the Namibia Wildlife Trust to protect big-game animals from poachers in a way that includes local expertise and values.

In reviewing conservation’s advances and missteps, Nijhuis argues that the mission of such efforts must be “the protection of biological diversity, ecological complexity, and the evolutionary process – in short, the preservation of possibility.” “Beloved Beasts” is not didactic, but it’s still a call to action. And it has compassionate advice for readers who yearn for resilience amid the pandemic and the climate crisis.

“The past accomplishments of conservation were not inevitable,” Nijhuis argues, “and neither are its predicted failures. We can move forward by understanding the story of struggle and survival we already have – and seeing the possibilities in what remains to be written.”

With urgency, passion, and wit, Nijhuis recognizes those possibilities clearly and writes both to preserve history and predict what may lie ahead. “The great challenge of conservation is to sustain complexity, in its many forms, and by doing so protect the possibility of a future for all life on earth. And for that,” Nijhuis warns, “there are no panaceas.”

Alternately heartbreaking and encouraging, “Beloved Beasts” proposes a larger vision of stewardship – one that extends beyond just winsome or majestic creatures to encompass the entire planet.

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Beloved Beasts : Book summary and reviews of Beloved Beasts by Michelle Nijhuis

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Beloved Beasts

Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction

by Michelle Nijhuis

Beloved Beasts by Michelle Nijhuis

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Published Mar 2021 352 pages Genre: Science, Health and the Environment Publication Information

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About this book

Book summary.

A vibrant history of the modern conservation movement - told through the lives and ideas of the people who built it.

In the late nineteenth century, as humans came to realize that our rapidly industrializing and globalizing societies were driving other animal species to extinction, a movement to protect and conserve them was born. In Beloved Beasts , acclaimed science journalist Michelle Nijhuis traces the movement's history: from early battles to save charismatic species such as the American bison and bald eagle to today's global effort to defend life on a larger scale. She describes the vital role of scientists and activists such as Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson as well as lesser-known figures in conservation history; she reveals the origins of vital organizations like the Audubon Society and the World Wildlife Fund; she explores current efforts to protect species such as the whooping crane and the black rhinoceros; and she confronts the darker side of conservation, long shadowed by racism and colonialism. As the destruction of other species continues and the effects of climate change escalate, Beloved Beasts charts the ways conservation is becoming a movement for the protection of all species―including our own. 15 illustrations

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Reader reviews.

"A fine history of the genesis of the conservation movement. Compassionate yet realistic and candid throughout, Nijhuis makes a significant contribution to the literature on environmentalism. An engrossing history of conservation and its accomplishments." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review) "[A] defining and invaluable chronicle of an increasingly urgent lifesaving effort." - Booklist (starred review) "Nijhuis's comprehensive survey is sure to delight nature enthusiasts and those concerned with disappearing species." - Publishers Weekly " Beloved Beasts is the definitive history of the conservation movement, in all its turbulent, passionate, problematic glory. It shines a bright and unsparing light on environmentalism's most influential hidden figures, and breathes new life into Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, and other heroes you thought you knew. The centuries-long campaign to protect our fellow creatures finally has the literary epic it deserves." - Ben Goldfarb "From the origin of the concept of species through the CRISPR revolution, Beloved Beasts is at once thoughtful and thought-provoking―a crucial addition to the literature of our troubled time." - Elizabeth Kolbert "If 'attention is prayer,' as Simone Weil suggests, then Michelle Nijhuis's carefully observed Beloved Beasts is a benediction bestowed not so much upon the men and women who carry out the work of species conservation but upon the very act of living in conversation with the more-than-human world." - Elizabeth Rush

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Author Information

Michelle nijhuis.

Michelle Nijhuis is a project editor at the Atlantic , a contributing editor at High Country News , and an award-winning reporter whose work has been published in National Geographic and the New York Times Magazine . She is coeditor of The Science Writers' Handbook and lives in White Salmon, Washington.

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beloved beasts book review

10 Movies That Perfectly Cast Beloved Book Characters

  • Jennifer Lawrence perfectly captures the essence of Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games.
  • Ian McKellen's portrayal of Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings is iconic and impactful.
  • Tom Felton embodies the entitled and prideful Draco Malfoy in the Harry Potter films.

Movie adaptations of beloved books have the difficult task of casting characters that many fans already have a clearly defined image of after reading, but some movies nailed the casting . For the most part, when a novel is popular enough to warrant a movie adaptation, there is a dedicated fanbase who passionately loves the story and its characters. Developing a popular book or series into a film then becomes a challenge as the film needs to translate the events and the core characters into a new medium, and that includes getting the right actors to do the job.

Because the stories tend to revolve around the characters involved, putting the right actors in the right roles is essential. Fortunately, some very talented directors and casting directors met that challenge and found the perfect individuals to adapt the source material. Whether the book is an epic fantasy in need of a tall grey-haired wizard, or a teenage supernatural romance looking for a bland and ordinary young woman to be swept up in an adventure, the right actor can bring the other parts of a story together and deliver something spectacular.

Jennifer Lawrence As Katniss Everdeen

The hunger games.

The popular series of novels by Suzanne Collins revolves around a young female protagonist who bravely volunteers as tribute to save her sister in The Hunger Games . Katniss Everdeen is young, beautiful, strong, confident, and stubborn, and Jennifer Lawrence captured all of these elements perfectly . In contrast to the brutality and greediness of the faux-civilized people of the Capitol, Katniss and her peers in the district are enslaved in servitude to the Panem government. However, Katniss has a rebellious spirit and fights hard to protect the people and places she loves.

The Hunger Games is a multi-movie franchise starring Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss Everdeen. The films are based on the young adult dystopian book series by author Suzanne Collins. The first film was released in 2012, followed by Catching Fire in 2013, Mockingjay Part 1 in 2014, and Mockingjay Part 2 in 2015. In 2023, the fifth film in the series was released, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.

Ian McKellen As Gandalf

The lord of the rings.

Many of the cast of The Lord of the Rings trilogy are perfectly suited to their roles, but one stand-out performance has to be Ian McKellen as Gandalf . McKellen is a classically trained British actor who started performing in theater in the early 1960s. Over the decades, he dabbled in work with TV and film, but his most iconic performance came as the wise wizard, Gandalf, in the Peter Jackson films adapted from J. R. R. Tolkien's classic novels. McKellen is an enormous presence on screen, and with Gandalf towering over the rest of the cast, this was essential.

10 "What If" Movie Castings That Would Have Completely Changed Hollywood

McKellen also imbued elements of drama, humor, playfulness, and a darker side to the character, as only an actor with his considerable talent and range could do. Despite Gandalf having long absences between showing up in the epic films, his presence and influence permeate throughout the series . In addition, when Gandalf the Grey heroically sacrifices himself to protect the fellowship and is later restored as Gandalf the White, McKellen's performance makes the transition seamless and impactful.

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring is the first film in Peter Jackson's critically acclaimed Lord of the Rings trilogy. The movie follows Frodo Baggins (Elijah Woods) as he is tasked with destroying the One Ring in the fires of Mount Doom after he inherits the ring.

Tom Felton As Draco Malfoy

Harry potter and the sorceror's stone.

Harry Potter is another series where many of the actors, both old and young, played their parts perfectly. However, one young actor stands out as being the perfect translation from the novels to the screen, and that is Tom Felton as Draco Malfoy . Felton was just 13 years old at the time of filming the first movie, and despite his age, he captured the entitled, prideful air of young Master Malfoy perfectly . Both his looks with his blonde hair and piercing eyes, and his performance perfectly match the character as envisioned in the books.

Harry Potter

Harry Potter is a multimedia franchise about an orphaned boy who enrolls at Hogwarts School of Wizardry, where he learns the truth about himself, his family, and the terrible evil that haunts the magical world. Adapted from the novels, Harry Potter is an eight-episode film saga that follows the journey of Harry Potter and his friends, Hermoine Granger and Ron Weasley, as they navigate the tricky world of growing up, school life, and magic. Starting from year one and moving to their seventh year, the films chronicle the students' time at Hogwarts while unfurling a sinister plot that centers around the unsuspecting Harry. With the return of the dark wizard, Voldemort, the students and professors at Hogwarts will fight to carry on as the world around them may change forever. Harry Potter has expanded beyond the world of its films and novels with several video games, a spin-off film series titled Fantastic Beasts, and even attractions at Universal Studios.

Anthony Hopkins As Hannibal Lecter

Silence of the lambs.

While other actors have tackled the role of Hannibal Lecter and delivered incredible performances, Anthony Hopkins is responsible for popularizing the character thanks to his captivating performance in The Silence of the Lambs . Playing opposite Jodie Foster as Clarice Starling, both leads won an Oscar for their performance in this film that brought the creation of Thomas Harris to the masses. Hopkins is equal parts brilliant and terrifying as the cannibalistic genius, Dr. Hannibal Lecter.

Silence of the Lambs

The Silence of the Lambs follows FBI trainee Clarice Sterling (Jodie Foster) as she hunts a serial killer known as Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine). To find the killer, she must place her trust in the notoriously dangerous but brilliant cannibal, Dr. Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins). With Buffalo Bill's latest victim the daughter of a U.S. Senator, the pressure is on Sterling to catch the criminal before he can bring his twisted scheme to fruition.

Kristen Stewart As Bella Swan

The Twilight saga has its flaws, but the movies are largely faithful adaptations of the novels. For example, Bella Swan's character in the book is described as reclusive, quiet, and appearing shy on the surface, in addition to being prone to view herself in a negative light. The character is framed as someone who does not make an impact or a big impression, in contrast with the brilliant and beautiful Cullens who immediately draw attention wherever they go. Kirsten Stewart does an incredible job boiling the character down to the essentials and delivering the role as the novel intended.

Based on Stephenie Meyer’s book of the same name, Twilight follows Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart), who falls madly in love with Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson), who she soon finds out is a vampire. Falling in love with her at the same time, Edward and Bella must overcome obstacles to preserve their forbidden relationship.

10 Biggest Movie Casting Shocks That Actually Worked

André the giant as fezzik, the princess bride.

The Princess Bride is one of the best comedy films of the 80s, and the film's dry wit and slapstick humor still packs a punch today. Along with the larger-than-life personality of the film, the film features a character whose enormous presence is felt in every scene where he appears: Fezzik. Fezzik joins Westley and his crew on an adventure to save the Princess. In a role that was specifically written for him by the author (via Pro Wrestling Stories ), André the Giant delivered a career-defining performance in one of his few leading film roles.

Based on the 1973 novel by William Goldman, The Princess Bride is a comical fantasy adventure film that tells a swashbuckling tale of a hero and a princess, read to a young, sick boy in bed by his grandfather. The story itself follows farmhand Westley, who embarks on an epic journey to save his beloved princess from an evil prince as he meets strange but reliable companions along the way.

Jackie Earle Haley As Rorschach

Watchmen is one of the most iconic graphic novels ever created, and when it was adapted in 2009, it demanded a talented cast to bring the powerful story to the big screen. Fortunately, several of the actors cast were perfect, but Jackie Earle Haley, who played Rorschach, was positively perfect . Rorschach is an anti-hero with a clear set of rules, and a relentless determination to bring criminals to justice. As both the narrator for the story and a central protagonist who drives the action forward, Haley is the perfect choice for the masked vigilante who holds everyone to account.

In 1986, DC Comics published a comic book limited series consist of 12 issues titled Watchmen . Creator Alan Moore worked with artist Dave Gibbons for the project, which released monthly issues from 1986 to 1985. A movie adaptation was released in March 2009 under the direction of Zack Snyder. The story of Watchmen happens in an alternate reality 1985, with references to events that occurred in the 1940s and 1960s.

Rooney Mara As Lisbeth Salander

The girl with the dragon tattoo.

David Fincher's adaptation of the best-selling novel by Stieg Larsson, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo , Rooney Mara delivers a standout performance as the conflicted protagonist , Lisbeth Salander. The character is incredibly complex with a traumatic past and an iron will, but Mara was able to match the novel's vision and bring Lisbeth to life on the big screen. Her performance hit all the right notes and the transformation into the character appears unrecognizable from the actress herself, which makes it all the more impressive.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

Based on the award-winning novel by Stieg Larsson, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo follows journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) as he searches for a woman who has been missing for 40 years. Along the way, he makes an unexpected ally in Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara), who is a computer hacker and survivor of a traumatic childhood. The film is directed by David Fincher and won an Oscar in 2012 for Best Achievement in Film Editing.

Christian Bale As Patrick Bateman

American psycho.

Bret Easton Ellis' novel, American Psycho, is widely praised for its powerful imagery, introspective exploration of postmodernism, and complex central character, Patrick Bateman. Adapting the novel for film, the story contains many hard-to-watch and challenging moments, with a protagonist who is both disturbed, but also highly charismatic. Tackling the role, Christian Bale perfectly captures the duality of the character who presents a mask to those around him, while being hyper-obsessive about minor details, such as the design of a business card. This was Bale's breakout performance that launched his career, thanks to his extraordinary talent.

Based on the book of the same name by Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho follows Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale) an investment banker in New York in 1987 who leads a double life as a serial killer. As investigators circle Bateman after the disappearance of a colleague, he finds himself trapped in a spiral of murder and excess, unable to stop himself from giving in to his increasingly dark urges. Also stars Willem Dafoe, Jared Leto, Justin Theroux, and Reese Witherspoon. 

10 Great Stephen King Movie Castings That Could Have Been

Robert downey jr. as tony stark.

Another comic book hero, Robert Downey Jr., perfectly embodied the character of Tony Stark in the flagship film of the MCU, Iron Man . With similarities between the character and Downey Jr.'s own life, it makes sense that he was able to deliver such a convincing performance for the film. Both characters struggled with early success and wealth, which led to irresponsible living, and when given a second chance at a life that could help and impact others, they grabbed it. Downey Jr. is Iron Man, and his performance further proves just how perfect he was in the role .

Iron Man is the first film in the long-running Marvel Cinematic Universe franchise. Robert Downey Jr. stars as Tony Stark, who becomes Iron Man after he is kidnapped and discovers terrorists are using weapons developed by Stark Industries. Gwyneth Paltrow stars as Tony's love interest Pepper Potts alongside Jon Favreau as Happy Hogan and Jeff Bridges as the villainous Obadiah Stane.

10 Movies That Perfectly Cast Beloved Book Characters

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Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction

A vibrant history of the modern conservation movement—told through the lives and ideas of the people who built it.

In the late nineteenth century, as humans came to realize that our rapidly industrializing and globalizing societies were driving other animal species to extinction, a movement to protect and conserve them was born. In  Beloved Beasts , acclaimed science journalist Michelle Nijhuis traces the movement’s history: from early battles to save charismatic species such as the American bison and bald eagle to today’s global effort to defend life on a larger scale.

She describes the vital role of scientists and activists such as Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson as well as lesser-known figures in conservation history; she reveals the origins of vital organizations like the Audubon Society and the World Wildlife Fund; she explores current efforts to protect species such as the whooping crane and the black rhinoceros; and she confronts the darker side of conservation, long shadowed by racism and colonialism.

As the destruction of other species continues and the effects of climate change escalate,  Beloved Beasts  charts the ways conservation is becoming a movement for the protection of all species—including our own.

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beloved beasts book review

First Black ‘Doctor Who’ Ncuti Gatwa Injects Life Into Flagging Series

After a maligned few seasons, the beloved sci-fi series is back to win over new fans—and make history with its first Black Doctor. The result is a win for the franchise…mostly.

Allegra Frank

Allegra Frank

Deputy Entertainment Editor

Ncuti Gatwa and Millie Gibson look at a large molecule in a still from ‘Doctor Who’

The latest season of Doctor Who —the BBC show’s debut on Disney+, with its first-ever simultaneous worldwide release—comes with a lofty goal. Can it generate a new audience for this decades-old series, now on its fifteenth iteration? A charming new lead in Barbie ’s Ncuti Gatwa, a celebrated showrunner, and guest stars like Jonathan Groff and RuPaul's Drag Race ’s Jinkx Monsoon go a long way toward achieving that aim. But for viewers not already onboard with the TARDIS -hopping Time Lord (or sure what that even means), the newly anointed Season 1 might not immediately convince you to come along.

Premiering May 10, Episode 1 picks up right after December’s Christmas special , in which Gatwa was introduced as the newest Doctor. (There have been 16 actors in this role over the years; Gatwa is the 16th, but canonically referred to as the Fifteenth Doctor.) But a quick recap will bring newbies up to speed: The Doctor is the last being of his kind, an alien from a now-extinct faraway galaxy in the future who can “regenerate” into new forms upon death. They are, in that way, immortal. Unmoored without a home planet, the Doctor travels through time at their leisure, with the help of a classic blue police box that doubles as a spaceship.

But to combat the obvious loneliness of a life spent on the road across space and time, the Doctor traditionally recruits a different human companion or three to come along for the ride. This season, the Doctor has partnered up with Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson), a spunky teen whose life he saved from dancing aliens in the special. Together, Ruby and the Doctor jet set into the past, present, and future, meeting and helping people—Ruby conveniently has few Earthly responsibilities to hold her back, plus the blessing of her adoptive mother.

Every season of the show shares this basic premise, dating back to the 1960s . But each one has its own subplots to give the story shape. In this case—based on the two episodes sent for review—the Doctor is devoted to finding Ruby’s birth mother, who abandoned her as a baby. But the plot development largely takes a backseat to the fun and games, which aren’t always as fun for us as they are for the Doctor and Ruby.

Ncuti Gatwa and Millie Gibson stand in a room full of steam a still from ‘Doctor Who’

Millie Gibson and Ncuti Gatwa

The first episode in particular suggests a rough start for Gatwa’s stint. Doctor Who ’s creative team, including returning showrunner Russell T. Davies, have been upfront about this show being as much for kids as it is for families. But the series’ silliness is best tempered by its leads’ performances, like David Tennant’s iconic turn as a casually wacky Time Lord. Even someone as charming as Gatwa, however, can’t spin material about talking “space babies” into something more than inane. But the season premiere forces the Doctor to walk Ruby through the brass tacks of Time Lord-dom while bouncing hyper-intelligent infants from the future—whose mouths creepily move when speaking their dialogue—upon his knee. The episode’s monster-of-the-week bad guy’s low-budget design doesn’t help matters. It’s a shocking misfire of an installment at the most-important moment, forcing new viewers to suspend their disbelief beyond what may be humanly possible.

It’s understandable if they want to turn off after this first episode, but if they’re tickled enough by Gatwa’s rhythmic movements and instant chemistry with Gibson, they’ll be happy they stuck around for the second. Episode 2 is the preceding hour’s polar opposite: It’s Doctor Who at its most playful, winsome, and euphoric. A trip to 1963 Liverpool finds Ruby and the Doctor decked out in stylishly mod outfits, mingling with the Beatles, and facing off with a villainous supernatural interloper (Monsoon). It’s an energetic hour that sets the season back on a much more endearing course. Monsoon’s outsized performance, including a musical number and chilling monologue, is especially great; it’s the kind of infectiously fun, highly campy stuff that genre shows like this one do best.

Jinkx Monsoon lays on top of a piano in a still from ‘Doctor Who’

Jinkx Monsoon

Doctor Who often drops in on historical moments to inject a little flavor into familiar scenes, which is a far more enjoyable, playful sci-fi than the blandly futuristic jaunts. It’s the best way to use the show’s time-travel concept, especially for a newbie who doesn’t care or know what “ Gallifrey ” is. And considering Gatwa gets an entire song-and-dance moment, one can only hope that this episode is way more in line with the rest of the adventures to come—and less like the space babies drama.

Ncuti Gatwa and Millie Gibson walk across the street in a still from ‘Doctor Who’

Ncuti Gatwa and Millie Gibson

One bad episode would be much more forgivable if there weren’t so much riding on this iteration of Doctor Who . Gatwa is the first Black man and openly queer actor to assume the role; showrunner Davies, who helped reboot the show the first time back in 2005 and presided over the beloved Tennant years, returns to placate fans who dogpiled on the past two seasons. (The previous Doctor was the show’s much-maligned, first female lead ; one can assume the kinds of critics Gatwa’s season is up against.) Whether the team can stay spirited without devolving into inanity or convolution will determine its success, and help bring this stumbling show back to life. But two episodes in, the new Who is off to a promising start.

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'Long Island' renders bare the universality of longing

Heller McAlpin

Cover of Long Island

Sometimes a literary character's hold on its author (and readers!) is too strong to ignore. While many sequels feel like attempts to milk a cash cow, others, like Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge novels, bring fresh delight.

Long Island , Colm Tóibín's heartrending follow-up to his beloved 2009 novel, Brooklyn, is the rare instance in which a sequel is every bit as good as the original.

Brooklyn, which was further popularized by the eponymous 2015 movie starring Saoirse Ronan, concerns a young Irish immigrant torn between her new home and her old one in the 1950s. Eilis Lacey, recently sent to America by her family for better prospects, returns to Enniscorthy in County Wexford, her hometown and Tóibín's, for the funeral of her beloved older sister. Her mother, alone now that Rose is dead, doesn't want Eilis to leave. But Eilis can't bring herself to tell her — or anyone, including the man with whom she strikes up a romance — that she's married to an Italian-American plumber she met at a dance in Brooklyn.

Long Island picks up Eilis' story 25 years later, when she learns that her husband, Tony Fiorello, has impregnated one of his married clients, whose husband has categorically rejected the child. Eilis, too, adamantly refuses to have anything to do with the baby. Tony's family, who live cheek-by-jowl in a cluster of houses in Lindenhurst, Long Island, have always viewed Eilis as an outsider. To escape the tremendous pressure from them to accept this child, Eilis decides to absent herself when the baby is due by returning to Ireland for the first time in more than 20 years. She arranges for her two teenage children, Rosella and Larry, to join her in time for the 80th birthday of the grandmother they've never met.

Everyone in Enniscorthy finds Eilis profoundly changed, "like a different person." She tells no one why she's there, including her testy mother, who lets Eilis know how insulting she finds her daughter's patronizing attempts to fix up her home after such a long absence.

When Eilis stops in to see her former best friend, Nancy Sheridan, widowed for five years, neither woman is open about what's going on in their lives. Nancy, not wanting to overshadow her daughter's upcoming wedding, is keeping her impending engagement to Jim Sheridan, the pub owner whom Eilis jilted 25 years ago without an explanation, under wraps for the time being.

Ah, secrets. Tóibín, whose flawless ear captures the constant murmur of gossip that courses through small towns like Enniscorthy, is also sharply attuned to the unspoken. Such circumspection has long underpinned his fiction, including The Master and The Magician, in which he depicted the complicated lives and carefully repressed sexuality of literary titans Henry James and Thomas Mann with graceful nuance.

As always, Tóibín's narrative restraint heightens tension and allows readers to fill in the blanks. We marvel at his skill as we watch his characters in Long Island become ensnared in the elaborate web of strategically withheld information and calculated partial truths he has them spin.

Long Island shares with The Magician and story collections such as The Empty Family a concern with the pain of the exile's return after a long absence. But while in Brooklyn, Eilis' relationships with two very different men separated by thousands of miles underscores the theme of an immigrant uneasily straddling two cultures, Long Island finds her more deeply rooted in America. Anchored by her American children and her bookkeeping job, Eilis' future wouldn't be in question if not for the situation with Tony's baby. Her subsequent return to Ireland causes a pull not between countries but between reason and romance, moral obligations and what the heart desires. Among the many discussion-worthy questions this novel poses: Which is worse, to betray someone, or to betray your feelings?

Tóibín's portrait of Eilis is sympathetic, both in her youthful dissembling and in her current decisiveness, which borders on intransigence. Long Island finds her not just more mature but more self-assured after decades of marriage, motherhood, and holding her own against her intrusive in-laws. Her imperatives — what she feels she has to do, whether about the unwanted baby or her future — are non-negotiable. When Jim talks about his sadness over her abrupt, hurtful parting years ago, Eilis responds without apparent remorse or sympathy: "It was the way it had to be." But the changes she is contemplating this time involve many people and "many uncertainties," which require time to navigate.

Tóibín handles these uncertainties and moral conundrums with exquisite delicacy, zigzagging back and forth through time to build to a devastating climax. The tragedy of this novel about the universality of longing is that, even 25 years on, Eilis, however decisive, is still not in control of her own life.

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  1. BELOVED BEASTS

    Already the articles taken from the book for publication in The New Yorker are being widely discussed. Book-of-the-Month distribution in October will spread the message yet more widely. The book is not entirely negative; final chapters indicate roads of reversal, before it is too late! 4.

  2. The Long History of Those Who Fought to Save the Animals

    Ernest Freeberg is a professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and the author of "A Traitor to His Species: Henry Bergh and the Birth of the Animal Rights Movement.". BELOVED BEASTS ...

  3. Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction

    BELOVED BEASTS is an excellent new book about the history of modern wildlife conservation. This is the book I wish I had read years ago! If you want to learn about the relationships between conservation biology, environmentalism, the animal rights movement, hunting, and other related disciplines, this is the book for you.

  4. 'Beloved Beasts' Is a Riveting History of Conservation

    Such is the case with Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction, a new book by former biologist and acclaimed science journalist and editor Michelle Nijhuis. Beloved Beasts unwinds ...

  5. Book Review: Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction

    Beloved Beasts is a richly informative history of the international conservation movement and the central figures who have played crucial roles in developing conservationism and moving conservation efforts forward. The book is also about the ongoing debates, both philosophical and pragmatic, about "humanity's proper place on earth" (3). Written by Michelle Nijhuis, an award-winning ...

  6. Book Review: An Open-Eyed History of Wildlife Conservation

    BOOK REVIEW — "Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction," by Michelle Nijhuis (W. W. Norton & Company, 352 pages). "Beloved Beasts" reads as a who's who and greatest-moments survey of these developmental decades. Through the eyes and actions of individuals, it portrays the evolution of the surprisingly young field ...

  7. Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction

    Winner of the Sierra Club's 2021 Rachel Carson Award One of Chicago Tribune's Ten Best Books of 2021 Named a Top Ten Best Science Book of 2021 by Booklist and Smithsonian Magazine "At once thoughtful and thought-provoking," Beloved Beasts tells the story of the modern conservation movement through the lives and ideas of the people who built it, making "a crucial addition to the literature ...

  8. Book Review: Beloved Beasts—Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction

    ISBN 978-1-324-00168-3. No, it's not a species-by-species rundown of endangered animals—the beloved beasts that (some) humans are fighting to save. Instead, the book is about the humans themselves, the heroes of conservation who are behind the saving, and what they accomplished: From Carl Linnaeus, in 1729 (we can't protect something ...

  9. Extinction isn't inevitable. 'Beloved Beasts' explains why

    Books. Latest book reviews, author interviews, and reading trends. ... "Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction" by Michelle Nijhuis, W. W. Norton & Company, 352 pp.

  10. Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction

    Michelle Nijhuis' spirited and engaging Beloved Beasts tracks the not always predictable course of species protection from the flora and fauna classification system developed in the 18th century by the Swede Carl Linnaeus to the present day. Although much of her subject matter has been previously chronicled, the author makes it new by treating it as one continuous story and by focusing on ...

  11. Beloved Beasts

    But as The Atlantic project editor Michelle Nijhuis stresses in her new book, Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction, the Industrial Revolution and its many technological innovations significantly ratcheted up the impact of environmental devastation caused by human activities. By the late 19th century, environmentalists had ...

  12. Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction

    Winner of the Sierra Club's 2021 Rachel Carson Award One of Chicago Tribune 's Ten Best Books of 2021 "At once thoughtful and thought-provoking," Beloved Beasts tells the story of the modern conservation movement through the lives and ideas of the people who built it, making "a crucial addition to the literature of our troubled time" (Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction).

  13. Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction

    ― National Book Review "Lavishly researched, Beloved Beasts is a compassionate look at what humans have done―and need to do next―to protect the natural world." ― Amy Brady, Lithub " Beloved Beasts raises questions that get to the heart of the conservation movement's shortcomings…[A] much-needed critical history of conservation."

  14. All Book Marks reviews for Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age

    Michelle Nijhuis' spirited and engaging Beloved Beasts tracks the not always predictable course of species protection from the flora and fauna classification system developed in the 18th century by the Swede Carl Linnaeus to the present day. Although much of her subject matter has been previously chronicled, the author makes it new by treating it as one continuous story and by focusing on ...

  15. Beloved Beasts

    Michelle Nijhuis' Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction is a vibrant history of the modern conservation movement through the lives and ideas of the people who built it. ... Winner of the Sierra Club's 2021 Rachel Carson Award // One of the Chicago Tribune's 10 Best Books of 2021 // One of Smithsonian Magazine's 10 Best ...

  16. Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction

    Find helpful customer reviews and review ratings for Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction at Amazon.com. Read honest and unbiased product reviews from our users. ... This well written book provides a wealth of information on many of the major figures in the development of the field of conservation biology, but also more ...

  17. Summary and reviews of Beloved Beasts by Michelle Nijhuis

    This information about Beloved Beasts was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter.Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication.

  18. Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction

    Winner of the Sierra Club's 2021 Rachel Carson Award * One of Chicago Tribune's Ten Best Books of 2021 * Named a Top Ten Best Science Book of 2021 by Booklist and Smithsonian Magazine "At once thoughtful and thought-provoking," Beloved Beasts tells the story of the modern conservation movement through the lives and ideas of the people who built it, making "a crucial addition to the ...

  19. Beloved Beasts

    Winner of the Sierra Club's 2021 Rachel Carson Award One of Chicago Tribune 's Ten Best Books of 2021 Named a Top Ten Best Science Book of 2021 by Booklist and Smithsonian Magazine 'At once thoughtful and thought-provoking," Beloved Beasts tells the story of the modern conservation movement through the lives and ideas of the people who built it, making "a crucial addition to the ...

  20. Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction

    In the late nineteenth century, humans came at long last to a devastating realization: their rapidly industrializing and globalizing societies were driving scores of animal species to extinction. In Beloved Beasts, acclaimed science journalist Michelle Nijhuis traces the history of the movement to protect and conserve other forms of life. From early battles to save charismatic species such as ...

  21. 10 Movies That Perfectly Cast Beloved Book Characters

    Robert Downey Jr. stars as Tony Stark, who becomes Iron Man after he is kidnapped and discovers terrorists are using weapons developed by Stark Industries. Gwyneth Paltrow stars as Tony's love ...

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    Pop Culture A New Book Reveals the Transformative Techniques of a Makeup Guru Beloved by Artists. Published by A24, "The Beauty of the Beast" is a first-of-its-kind manual to combine beauty and ...

  23. Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction

    In Beloved Beasts, acclaimed science journalist Michelle Nijhuis traces the movement's history: ... Book reviews & recommendations : IMDb Movies, TV & Celebrities: IMDbPro Get Info Entertainment Professionals Need: Kindle Direct Publishing Indie Digital & Print Publishing Made Easy

  24. Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction

    Format Hardcover. ISBN 9781324001683. A vibrant history of the modern conservation movement—told through the lives and ideas of the people who built it. In the late nineteenth century, as humans came to realize that our rapidly industrializing and globalizing societies were driving other animal species to extinction, a movement to protect and ...

  25. 'Living With Leopards' Review: Noble Beasts on Netflix

    Photo: Netflix. A nature film rich in startling imagery, "Living With Leopards" begins very simply, with a tree, perhaps a baobab, silhouetted against a sunrise. A black cutout against an ...

  26. Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction

    Winner of the Sierra Club's 2021 Rachel Carson Award. One of Chicago Tribune's Ten Best Books of 2021 Named a Top Ten Best Science Book of 2021 by Booklist and Smithsonian Magazine "At once thoughtful and thought-provoking," Beloved Beasts tells the story of the modern conservation movement through the lives and ideas of the people who built it, making "a crucial addition to the literature ...

  27. The First Black 'Doctor Who' Injects Life Into Flagging Series

    Gatwa is the first Black man and openly queer actor to assume the role; showrunner Davies, who helped reboot the show the first time back in 2005 and presided over the beloved Tennant years ...

  28. Colm Tóibín's 'Long Island' sequel to 'Brooklyn' : NPR

    Long Island, Colm Tóibín's heartrending follow-up to his beloved 2009 novel, Brooklyn, is the rare instance in which a sequel is every bit as good as the original. Brooklyn, which was further ...