"JIM STERBA has been a foreign correspondent and national affairs reporter for more than four decades for the Wall Street Journal and New York Times. He is the author of Frankie's Place- A Love Story, about summers in Maine with his wife, the author Frances FitzGerald."
Smart and provocative...Nature Wars is a counterintuitive
take on a social problem, and the tone is knowing and smart, not
sarcastic or snide. --Chicago Tribune
[A] sweeping and thoughtful work... there's a lot in Nature
Wars for the reasoned and concerned human to learn about the
changing natural landscape...[Sterba] paints a vivid and memorable
portrait of these new eco systems, where only one, plentiful
species is capable of bringing balance and harmony among living
things: homo sapiens. --LA Times
Fascinating...Sterba portrays the resulting conflicts not only
between people and animals but also between hunters and activists,
government officials and residents, and any number of other
factions. --Washington Post
Written with considerable charm and more wit than commonly found in
works that deal with ecosystems, [Nature Wars] includes
extensive and often entertaining treatments of such common
nuisances as beavers, Canada geese, and feral cats...For the
denatured reader, there is a wealth of useful statistics. --New
York Review of Books
While advancing his brief that mankind has to do more to intervene
as managers in the natural process, Sterba also ably documents how
we influence wildlife without really trying or realizing it.
--Christian Science Monitor
Jim Sterba's Nature Wars chronicles the dilemmas created by
the resurgence of wildlife populations in much of the eastern
United States...[A] thoughtful text. --Seattle Times
[Sterba] makes a provocative, controversial, but quite compelling
case that we should not - and cannot - opt out of active management
and stewardship of wildlife. --Pittsburgh
Post-Gazette
In Nature Wars, Sterba, an award-winning journalist,
examines how modern society is fighting a new war against the
wildlife and nature that surround us...an interesting look at how
man's attempt to control nature has created even more
problems...Thoroughly researched. --Deseret
News
In his book Nature Wars, [Sterba] highlights nature's
perils... nature has never been as idyllic as we think. --Emma
Bryce, Discover Magazine
This is an excellent introduction to a "problem" that is often one
of human perception. --Booklist, starred
review
Jim Sterba employs humor and an eye for the absurd to document the
sometimes bizarre conflicts that arise as a consequence of
America's transformed relationship with nature... An eye-opening
take on how romantic sentimentalism about nature can have
destructive consequences. --Kirkus, starred
review
Sterba provocatively and persuasively argues that just at the
moment when humankind has distanced itself irrevocably from nature,
its behavior patterns have put people in conflict with a natural
world that they don't know how to deal with...A valuable
counternarrative to the mainstream view of nature-human
interaction. --Publisher's Weekly
"In this
elegant and compelling tour of America's mutating connections with
its land and wildlife, Jim Sterba uses wit and insight to reveal
new and unintended consequences of human sprawl and the ways in
which they have shaped today's relationships with Nature."
--John H Adams, Founding Director, Natural Resources Defense
Council
"It's a jungle out there - and we're living in it. Jim Sterba's
Nature Wars is a smart, stylish and altogether provocative
account of how we are confounded by that which we claim to hold so
dear - Mother Nature and all her creatures moving in right next
door." --Tom Brokaw
"Jim Sterba describes a cockeyed country whose denizens
spend billions to imitate nature in their own small domains, little
realizing that their excess creates an environment to which other
species are fatefully drawn in increasing, sometimes alarming
numbers; that they themselves are the creatures who throw this
shared habitat out of whack. An unusual feat of deep and sustained
reporting, Nature Wars is full of surprises and marked, from
first page to last, by uncommon sense, graceful writing and
precious wit." --Joseph Lelyveld, author of Great Soul:
Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India
"Quite unintentionally and with little awareness by its
inhabitants, over the past century the Eastern United States has
become one of the most heavily forested and densely populated
regions in world history. Nature Wars explores this
marvelous story of environmental recovery and the opportunities and
challenges that it brings to its residents and the entire globe in
fascinating detail and with great insight by Jim Sterba. This is a
great book and a story with lessons for us all." --David Foster,
Ecologist and Director of the Harvard Forest, Harvard
University
"If there is one lesson to be learned from Jim Sterba's book, it
is: Be careful what you wish for. Having decimated our planet's
natural state, we are blithely over-compensating, over -correcting
and overturning the balance of nature yet again. Nature, as seen by
most of us through a double glazed picture window revealing a
manicured lawn....but what's that moose being chased by a coyote
being chased by a black bear, doing there? Read Nature Wars
and weep. Or at least, stop and think." --Morley Safer
In Nature Wars, Jim Sterba lays out battle lines that
emerged after populations of species that declined to
near-extinction by the end of the 19th century came roaring
back...This book is sure to initiate discussion about an issue that
seems likely to move closer to the forefront in the years ahead.
--Jerry Harkavy
In this book, Jim Sterba has given us a fascinating, powerful, and
important lesson in why we should be careful when we mess with
Mother Nature." --Winston Groom, author of Forrest
Gump
"At last someone's grappling with the elephant
in the room - or rather the deer, the coyote, the beaver, the bear,
all these damn animals crowding into our living space. Sterba's
book may strike some as observational comedy but he's deadly
serious. Every word rings true. Nature is vengeful. All I can say
is, he better not take a walk in his backyard without a shotgun."
--John Darnton, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of
Almost a Family
"A wonderful, thought-provoking, important book that will overturn
everything you thought you knew about wildlife in America. Jim
Sterba confronts the shibboleths that make man-versus-beast
conflicts so vexing, divisive, and fascinatingly complex.
--David Baron, author of The Beast in the Garden
"It's a truly original piece of work, often - I would say -
inspired, told in a pitch-perfect voice, just north of sarcastic
and south of appalled. At any event, a terrific read on a subject
that is all around us yet largely unobserved." --Ward Just,
author of Rodin's Debutante
Anything Jim Sterba
writes is worth reading--and his latest, Nature Wars, is
terrific. Sterba casts a reporter's sharp eye on a little noticed
war unfolding under our noses, in our own backyards. We've messed
with nature for way too long, and nature is getting even.
--Joseph L. Galloway, co-author of We Were Soldiers
Once...and Young and We Are Soldiers Still
"Jim Sterba has done a brilliant job explain how it happens that
drivers more often than ever run into deer, wild turkeys fly into
speeding car windshields and gorge on newly-planted seed corn, and
why golf courses are filled with people chasing geese down the
fairways with 5 irons in hand. This informative and beautifully
written book gives us the effect of civilization (often
well-meaning) on the natural habitat, both flora and fauna. I loved
the book and learned a great deal from it." --Peter Duchin,
musician and author of Ghost of Chance If you love animals
and trees and other wonders of the natural world, this book will
astonish you. Sterba's great gifts are reportorial energy,
out-of-the-box thinking, and an easy, relaxed prose style that
makes Nature Wars a pleasure to read, even as its
counterintuitive discoveries explode on every page. --Daniel
Okrent, author of Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition
"Most Americans now live not in cities but in regrown forests,
among at least as many deer as when Columbus landed. Jim Sterba
tells us how this came to be and why it isn't all good. In
graceful, clear-eyed prose, he explains why we need to relearn how
to cut, cull and kill, to restore a more healthy balance to our
environment." --Paul Steiger, Editor-in-Chief, ProPublica Although
few of us realize it, America is at a turning point where we must
rethink our most fundamental ideas about nature, animals, and how
we live. Fortunately we have a wise and witty guide in Jim Sterba,
whose Nature Wars is my favorite kind of read -- a book that
affectionately recasts much of what we thought we knew about our
nation's past and our relationship to the American wild, while at
the same time revealing how intimately we ourselves are a part of
nature, but in the most surprising and unexpected ways. In Sterba's
hands, your everyday notions about the creatures around you --
whether pests, pets, or magnificent beasts -- will turn into
entirely new ways of seeing the world. --Trevor Corson, author of
The Secret Life of Lobsters and The Story of
Sushi
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