Zoologies
Zoologies (back cover)
Nonfiction

Zoologies

On Animals and the Human Spirit
By
Alison Hawthorne Deming
“A heart this wise gives me hope for my own species.”
—ALAN WEISMAN
Select Format

They have been everything from our food to our clothing, existing alternately as our adversaries, companions, jokes, or gods. And yet animals are leaving the world—both as physical beings and as symbols. In Zoologies, Alison Hawthorne Deming seeks to answer a vital question: What does the disappearance of animals mean for human imagination?

With a mixture of humor, reverence, and curiosity, Deming paints a vivid portrait of the world that made us, and the wisdom we are losing as so many of its creatures fade away. Ranging from the Serengeti to Madrid to her own backyard, she considers what a pack of hyenas can teach us about human bloodlust, how the work of leafcutter ants complicates human art-making, and what elephants can tell us about the deep reverberations of peace and war in our communities. The resulting insights are as surprising as they are inspiring, unveiling an entirely new dimension to the great extinction currently unfolding around the earth.

ISBN
9781571313485
Publish Date
Pages
272
Dimensions
5.5 × 8.5 × 0.63 in
Weight
12.6 oz
Cover Art

Related Media

Watch: Encountering the Animal: Lecture and Reading by Alison Hawthorne Deming | Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art
Author
Alison Hawthorne Deming

Alison Hawthorne Deming

Alison Hawthorne Deming is the author of numerous works of nonfiction and poetry, most recently Zoologies: On Animals and the Human Spirit and the collections of poems Stairway to Heaven and Death Valley: Painted Light. She is currently the Agnese Nelms Haury Chair of Environment and Social Justice and Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Arizona.

Praise and Prizes

  • “Alison Hawthorne Deming makes connections between the unknown and the possible, creating a kind of understanding that is different from the observable.”

    Georgia Review

  • “Alison Deming writes with scrupulous and merciful passion about every kind of relatedness—family, place, politics, and wildlife. Her prose is rich in feeling, carefully detailed, and intimate. These essays, free of pieties and polemics, speak about love and the continuance of nature with humane moral fervor.”

    W. S. Di Piero

  • “What she is is a poet, like Thoreau, with an ability to see things in context—an ability cultivated with commitment for Alison Hawthorne Deming conceives of nature not only as what goes on in the woods, but as what goes on in our towns and cities, our back yards, ourselves.”

    Arizona Republic

  • “Alison Hawthorne Deming combines aesthetic splendor with serpentine intellect and wry humor.”

    Booklist

  • “To read Alison Hawthorne Deming is to be astonished by a truth never before seen, even though you might have been in that exact place, looking at just that forest road; to feel grief not as pain but as water; to wonder at the power of language in the hands of an artist who believes in the world the way a sculptor believes in wood; to be grateful that there has come onto this Earth a mind so lively and so beautiful as Deming’s.”

    Kathleen Dean Moore
    author of Wild Comfort

  • “However much or little you think of animals, you’ll never feel the same after visiting this literary menagerie: Each essay leaves you mulling the meaning of biological life—including ours—long afterwards. The beauty and ease of Alison Hawthorne Deming’s prose would do her namesake forebear Nathaniel proud, a heart this wise gives me hope for my own species.”

    Alan Weisman
    author of The World Without Us

  • “What are animals to us? And what are we to them? Alison Hawthorne Deming sinks her teeth into these mysteries and more in her sparkling Zoologies, and seems to illuminate everything in the nexus between the animal and human. This is the best bestiary I’ve seen in ages. Reading it I felt a little more alive.”

    Ander Monson
    author of Neck Deep and Other Predicaments

  • “Alison Hawthorne Deming is one of the wisest and most humble—of all the animals. She speaks for the whole kingdom while they patiently listen. She is our femme sage.”

    Gerald Stern

You Might Enjoy

Based on this book, we recommend you try…
Nonfiction

The Colors of Nature

Alison Hawthorne Deming and Lauret Savoy

For centuries, the richness of our world’s diverse stories has been widely overlooked by readers of environmental literature. This collection works against this blind spot, exploring the relationship between culture and place, emphasizing the lasting…

Nonfiction

The Quickening

Elizabeth Rush

An astonishing, vital book about Antarctica, climate change, and motherhood from the author of Rising, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction.

Nonfiction

Under A Wild Sky

William Souder

In the century and a half since John James Audubon’s death, his name has become synonymous with wildlife conservation and natural history. But few people know what a complicated figure he was—or the dramatic story behind The Birds of America—as…

Nonfiction

Thin Places

Kerri ní Dochartaigh

In Thin Places, a luminous blend of memoir, history, and nature writing, Kerri ní Dochartaigh explores how nature kept her sane and helped her heal after The Troubles.