Search results for ""author elizabeth marshall thomas""

This is the personal journal of a young American woman, living for six months amongst the Dodoth cattle-herdsmen in Northern Uganda. It is also an adventure story, for during this period the Dodoth were caught up in an escalating cycle of violence with their age-old rivals, the Turkana tribe. The animating tension of this feud was the tradition of cattle raiding, but it escalated to unprecedented levels of violence when the new nation states of Uganda and Kenya were drawn in to police these ancient clan frontiers. Elizabeth Marshall Thomas s total immersion in the life of this tribe in 1961 takes us with her, as with clarity and a lyrical eye for detail she brings their whole culture alive. For though she was not an academic herself, she had spent much time in the field with her mother, who was the world s leading authority on the Bushman of the Kalahari. So it was natural for Elizabeth Marshall Thomas to take her own young children on this adventure, where she proves herself such a brave, humane and unshockable witness to the life of the warrior herdsmen.

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Elizabeth Marshall Thomas has spent a lifetime observing the natural world, chronicling the customs of pre-contact hunter-gatherers and the secret lives of deer and dogs. In this book, the capstone of her long career, Thomas, now 88, turns her keen eye to her own life. The result is an account of growing old that is at once funny and charming, intimate and profound - both a memoir and a life-affirming map all of us may follow to embrace our later years with grace and dignity.Growing Old explores a wide range of issues connected with ageing, from stereotypes of the elderly as burdensome to the methods of burial that humans have used throughout history to how to deal with a concerned neighbour who assumes you're buying cat food to eat for dinner. Written with wit and compassion, this book is an expansive and deeply personal paean to the beauty and the brevity of life that offers understanding for everyone, regardless of age.

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An iconoclast and best-selling author of both nonfiction and fiction, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas has spent a lifetime observing, thinking, and writing about the cultures of animals such as lions, wolves, dogs, deer, and humans. In this compulsively readable book, she provides a plainspoken, big-picture look at the commonality of life on our planet, from the littlest microbes to the largest lizards.Inspired by the idea of symbiosis in evolution—that all living things evolve in a series of cooperative relationships—Thomas takes readers on a journey through the progression of life. Along the way she shares the universal likenesses, experiences, and environments of “Gaia’s creatures,” from amoebas in plant soil to the pets we love, from proud primates to Homo sapiens hunter-gatherers on the African savanna. Fervently rejecting “anthropodenial,” the notion that nonhuman life does not share characteristics with humans, Thomas instead shows that paramecia can learn, plants can communicate, humans aren’t really as special as we think we are—and that it doesn’t take a scientist to marvel at the smallest inhabitants of the natural world and their connections to all living things.A unique voice on anthropology and animal behavior, Thomas challenges scientific convention and the jargon that prevents us all from understanding all living things better. This joyfully written book is a fascinating look at the challenges and behaviors shared by creatures from bacteria to larvae to parasitic fungi, a potted hyacinth to the author herself, and all those in between.

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2017 is the 50th anniversary of The Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund and Karisoke Research Center in Rwanda. Three astounding women scientists have in recent years penetrated the jungles of Africa and Borneo to observe, nurture, and defend humanity's closest cousins. Jane Goodall has worked with the chimpanzees of Gombe for nearly 50 years; Diane Fossey died in 1985 defending the mountain gorillas of Rwanda; and Biruté Galdikas lives in intimate proximity to the orangutans of Borneo. All three began their work as protégées of the great Anglo-African archeologist Louis Leakey, and each spent years in the field, allowing the apes to become their familiars--and ultimately waging battles to save them from extinction in the wild. Their combined accomplishments have been mind-blowing, as Goodall, Fossey, and Galdikas forever changed how we think of our closest evolutionary relatives, of ourselves, and of how to conduct good science. From the personal to the primate, Sy Montgomery--acclaimed author of The Soul of an Octopus and The Good Good Pig--explores the science, wisdom, and living experience of three of the greatest scientists of the twentieth century.

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Employing a unique combination of psychology, philosophy, sociology, and dog training theory, Vicki Hearne recounts her experiences with Bandit, a dog deemed so dangerous that the state of Connecticut condemned him to death. Hearne rescued Bandit and was soon entrenched in a legal battle that extended well beyond his case as she fought to prove that no dog is inherently vicious. She quickly discovered the factors that contributed to Bandit's behavior and set about releasing the essentially "good dog" that lay within.

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Extraordinary new insights into the minds and lives of our fellow creatures from two of the world’s top animal authors, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas and Sy Montgomery. A Mail on Sunday “Critic's Pick” Best Read of the Year "In their writing and in their lives and in their remarkable friendship, Liz and Sy break down false barriers and carry us closer to our fellow creatures.”—from the foreword by Vicki Constantine Croke, author of Elephant Company Tamed and Untamed―a collection of essays penned by two of the world's most celebrated animal writers, Sy Montgomery and Elizabeth Marshall Thomas―explores the minds, lives, and mysteries of animals as diverse as snails, house cats, hawks, sharks, dogs, lions, and even octopuses. Drawing on stories of animals both wild and domestic, the two authors, also best friends, created this book to put humans back into the animal world. The more we learn about what other animals think and do, they explain, the more we understand ourselves as animals, too. Writes Montgomery, “The list of attributes once thought to be unique to our species―from using tools to waging war―is not only rapidly shrinking, but starting to sound less and less impressive when we compare them with other animals’ powers.” With humor, empathy, and introspection, Montgomery and Thomas look into the lives of all kinds of creatures―from man’s best friend to the great white shark―and examine the ways we connect with our fellow species. Both authors have devoted their lives to sharing the animal kingdom’s magic with others, and their combined wisdom is an indispensable contribution to the field of animal literature. The book contains a foreword by Vicki Constantine Croke, author of the bestseller Elephant Company.

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