Читать книгу One With the Tiger - Steven Church - Страница 2

Advance Praise for One With the Tiger

“In this engaging volume, essayist Church uses the story of David Villalobos’s 2012 jump into the Bronx Zoo’s tiger cage to launch a broader discussion on the connections people try to forge with animals—and the blurry line between humans and beasts . . . Readers expecting a narrow examination of Villalobos’s tiger encounter at the zoo will be rewarded instead with Church’s insightful exploration of human infatuation with nonhuman animals.”

—Publishers Weekly

“An exploration of the fascination with the ‘savage and the wild inside’ us, which fuels the human desire to ‘to get intimately close to apex predators’. . . a powerfully written attention-grabber.”

—Kirkus

“From the iron of a zoo cage’s bars to the expanse of our nation’s national parks, One With the Tiger examines the spaces in which humans contain animals, and how those acts of containment often fail. Church is a classically essayistic observer—curious, haunted, self-deprecating—and it’s through this lens that we’re confronted with stories of infamous animal attacks, pop culture icons, and the author›s own longing to inch forward as a bear approaches. In this marvelous collection, Church seems to write his consciousness directly onto the page, and in it we can see an entire civilization’s clumsy, sometimes desperate, attempts to understand our relationship to the wild.”

—Kristen Radtke, author of Imagine Wanting Only This

“Some of us are born with a lust for the ledges, for any chance to make the leap. In this mesmerizing collection, Steven Church proves, once again, that he is a master of evaporating lines between fact and fiction, imagination and memory. ‘It’s strange how a subject overtakes you,’ Church tells us. This book overtook me.”

—Jill Talbot, author of The Way We Weren’t and editor of Metawritings: Toward a Theory of Nonfiction

“One With the Tiger explores the deep human need to participate in an atavistic ecstasy; to be, as Church puts it, ‘absorbed but not destroyed.’ Church’s approach is not clinical, moralizing, or gee-whiz superficial; it is, to our benefit, essayistic. By circling rather than simplifying, he illuminates the taboo, ever-shifting boundaries between man and animal. Church is the rare author who knows what’s interesting—which is to say, uncomfortable—about his chosen subject.”

—Kerry Howley, author of Thrown