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Unlocking the Secrets of the Sea's Most Charismatic and Controversial Creatures
by Alix Morris
For readers of Jennifer Ackerman and Ed Yong, environmental journalist Alix Morris recounts the year she spent following seals, investigating their fascinating behavior, the effects of their extraordinary return from near extinction, and how we can try to bring nature back into balance.
It might be their large, strangely human eyes or their dog-like playfulness, but seals have long captured people's interest and affection, making them the perfect candidate for an environmental cause, as well as the subject of decades of study. Alix Morris spends a year with these magnetic creatures and brings them to life on the page, season by season, as she learns about their intelligence, their relationships with each other, their ecosystems, and the changing climate.
Along with the enigmatic seals themselves, Morris gets to know all of the competing interests in the intense debate about the newly recovered seal populations in our coastal waters, from local fisherman whose catch is often diminished by savvy seals, to tribes who once relied on seal-hunting for food, clothing, and medicine, to seal rescue workers and biologists, to surfers and swimmers now encountering seal-hunting sharks in coastal waters.
In a world where wildlife populations are disappearing at an alarming rate, A Year with the Seals is a rare look at what happens when conservation efforts actually work, and how human tampering with ecosystems continues to have unexpected consequences for a wide variety of species, humans included.
"A captivating account…Morris's evenhanded perspective eschews easy answers, finding instead a knotty parable about humanity's struggle to live within a natural world that people profoundly shape without ever achieving the absolute control they desire. Philosophical and impressively reported, this enthralls." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Morris, a masterful storyteller, has done full justice to these creatures of the deep. A wondrous look at our love-hate relationship with the most human of animals." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
This information about A Year with the Seals 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. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Alix Morris is a science writer in midcoast Maine. Her work has appeared in the Boston Globe Magazine, Smithsonian, Sierra Magazine, MIT Technology Review, Down East Magazine, and elsewhere, and she has graduate degrees in science writing from MIT and global health from Johns Hopkins. Her first book, A Year with the Seals, is supported by a grant from the Sloan Foundation.
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