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Children and Other Wild Animals book cover
Children and Other Wild Animals
2014
First Published
4.50
Average Rating
176
Number of Pages

In Children and Other Wild Animals, bestselling novelist, Brian Doyle, describes encounters with astounding beings of every sort and shape. These true tales of animals and human mammals (generally the smaller sizes, but here and there elders and jumbos) delightfully blur the line between the two. In these short vignettes, Doyle explores the seethe of life on this startling planet, the astonishing variety of our riveting companions, and the joys available to us when we pause, see, savor, and celebrate, the small things that are not small in the least. Doyle’s trademark quirky prose is at once lyrical, daring, and refreshing; his essays are poignant but not pap, sharp but not sermons, and revelatory at every turn. Throughout there is humor, and humility, and a palpable sense of wonder, with passages of reflection so true, and hard earned, they make you stop and reread a line, a paragraph, a page. Children and Other Wild Animals gathers previously unpublished work with selections that have appeared in Orion, The Sun, Utne Reader, High Country News, and The American Scholar, as well as Best American Essays and Best American Nature and Science Writing (“Fishering”). “The Creature Beyond the Mountain,” Doyle’s paean to the mighty and mysterious sturgeon of the Pacific Northwest, won the John Burroughs Award for Outstanding Nature Essay. As he notes in that tribute to all things 'sturgeonness': “Sometimes you want to see the forest, and not the trees. Sometimes you find yourself starving for what’s true, and not about a person, but about all people. This is how religion, and fascism, were born, but it’s also why music is the greatest of arts, and why stories matter, and why we all cannot help staring at fires and great waters.”

Avg Rating
4.50
Number of Ratings
273
5 STARS
63%
4 STARS
27%
3 STARS
8%
2 STARS
2%
1 STARS
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Author

Brian Doyle
Brian Doyle
Author · 26 books

Doyle's essays and poems have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, The American Scholar, Orion, Commonweal, and The Georgia Review, among other magazines and journals, and in The Times of London, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Kansas City Star, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Ottawa Citizen, and Newsday, among other newspapers. He was a book reviewer for The Oregonian and a contributing essayist to both Eureka Street magazine and The Age newspaper in Melbourne, Australia. Doyle's essays have also been reprinted in: * the Best American Essays anthologies of 1998, 1999, 2003, and 2005; * in Best Spiritual Writing 1999, 2001, 2002, and 2005; and * in Best Essays Northwest (2003); * and in a dozen other anthologies and writing textbooks. As for awards and honors, he had three startling children, an incomprehensible and fascinating marriage, and he was named to the 1983 Newton (Massachusetts) Men's Basketball League all-star team, and that was a really tough league. Doyle delivered many dozens of peculiar and muttered speeches and lectures and rants about writing and stuttering grace at a variety of venues, among them Australian Catholic University and Xavier College (both in Melbourne, Australia), Aquinas Academy (in Sydney, Australia); Washington State, Seattle Pacific, Oregon, Utah State, Concordia, and Marylhurst universities; Boston, Lewis & Clark, and Linfield colleges; the universities of Utah, Oregon, Pittsburgh, and Portland; KBOO radio (Portland), ABC and 3AW radio (Australia); the College Theology Society; National Public Radio's "Talk of the Nation," and in the PBS film Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero (2002). Doyle was a native of New York, was fitfully educated at the University of Notre Dame, and was a magazine and newspaper journalist in Portland, Boston, and Chicago for more than twenty years. He was living in Portland, Oregon, with his family when died at age 60 from complications related to a brain tumor.

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