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Grand Prize Winner of the Banff Mountain Book Competition
An "ode to wildness and wilderness" Down from the Mountain tells the story of one grizzly in the changing Montana landscape (Outside Magazine).
Millie was cunning, a fiercely protective mother to her cubs. But raising those cubs in the mountains was hard, as the climate warmed and people crowded the valleys.
There were obvious dangers, like poachers, and subtle ones, like the corn field that drew her into sure trouble. That trouble is where award-winning writer, farmer, and conservationist Bryce Andrews's story intersects with Millie's.
In this "welcome and impressive work" he shows how this drama is "the core of a major problem in the rural American West—the disagreement between large predatory animals and invasive modern settlers"—an entangled collision where the shrinking wilds force human and bear into ever closer proximity (Barry Lopez).
"The two sides of Bryce Andrews—enlightened rancher and sensitive writer—appear to make a smooth fit . . . Precise and evocative prose." —The Washington Post
"Rife with lyrical precision, first-hand know-how, ursine charisma, and a narrative jujitsu flip that places all empathy with his bears, Down from the Mountain is a one-of-a-kind triumph even here in the home of Doug Peacock and Douglas Chadwick." —David James Duncan, author of The River Why
"Would that we had more nature writing like Bryce Andrews's fantastic second book, Down from the Mountain . . . A subtle and beautifully unexpected book." —Literary Hub
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
November 21, 2023 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9781328972477
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9781328972477
- File size: 69773 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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November 15, 2018
Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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February 1, 2019
Both a rancher and a conservationist in Montana, Andrews assays the clash between humans and the large predators of the American West by chronicling the fate of a grizzly named Millie and her three cubs. As he's both a rancher and a conservationist, he's got a unique and valuable perspective. Following Badluck Way, the 2014 winner of the Barnes & Nobel Discover Great New Writers Award.
Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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Starred review from February 15, 2019
A thoughtful story of bears, humans, and their tragic interactions."Mouse-brown fur covered their strangely human bodies. Their eyes opened, seeing nothing for a time, then spring's white light." Montana-based conservationist Andrews (Badluck Way: A Year on the Ragged Edge of the West, 2013) writes without sentimentality or undue anthropomorphizing of a pair of grizzly cubs whose mother, Millie, was brutally murdered, leaving the cubs orphaned and helpless. "Millie's story...bothered everyone who heard about it," writes Andrews, having told an elegant story in which he himself encountered the trio. As a conservationist, he is in full sympathy with the bears; as someone living on the land, he recognizes the perils for all concerned when bears, hungry in a landscape with less and less game on it, come down into the cornfields below the high country. "My father asked what I thought about the farmer growing corn so close to the mountains," writes the author. "I said that it was complicated." Andrews introduces readers to numerous men and women who figure in the quest both to track down the poachers involved and to keep the cubs alive. One, the game warden for the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, is a quiet warrior for the bears even as others demand that they be kept away from human settlements. As the author notes, the collision course was set not just by hunger, but also by the ever encroaching human presence, even in vast Montana, and on a changing climate in which spring arrives a full month earlier than it did half a century ago, altering the long-established schedules of bears and people alike. In the end, Andrews writes, dispiritingly, "it seems that I could spend a lifetime building cornfield fences, worrying over cubs, and shipping elk meat to Maryland, and make no headway against our epidemic lack of restraint."A gem of environmental writing fitting alongside the work of Doug Peacock, Roger Caras, and other champions of wildlife and wild land.COPYRIGHT(2019) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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