For
fans of Helen MacDonald’s H is for Hawk and Mary Roach, Erica
Berry’s Wolfish blends science, history, and
cultural criticism in a years-long journey to understand our myths
about wolves, and track one legendary wolf, OR-7, from the Wallowa
Mountains of Oregon
"Wolfish
starts with a single wolf and spirals through nuanced investigations
of fear, gender, violence, and story. A GORGEOUS achievement."
—Blair Braverman, author of Welcome to the Goddamn Ice
Cube
“This is one of those stories
that begins with a female body. Hers was crumpled, roadside, in the
ash-colored slush between asphalt and snowbank.”
So begins Erica Berry’s
kaleidoscopic exploration of wolves, both real and symbolic. At the
center of this lyrical inquiry is the legendary OR-7, who roams away
from his familial pack in northeastern Oregon. While charting OR-7’s
record-breaking journey out of the Wallowa Mountains, Erica
simultaneously details her own coming-of-age as she moves away from
home and wrestles with inherited beliefs about fear, danger,
femininity, and the body.
As Erica chronicles her own
migration—from crying wolf as a child on her grandfather’s sheep
farm to accidentally eating mandrake in Sicily—she searches for new
expressions for how to be a brave woman, human, and animal in our
warming world. What do stories so long told about wolves tell us
about our relationship to fear? How can our society peel back the
layers of what scares us? By strategically unspooling the strands of
our cultural constructions of predator and prey, and what it means to
navigate a world in which we can be both, Erica bridges the gap
between human fear and grief through the lens of a wrongfully
misunderstood species.
Wolfish
is for anybody trying to navigate a world that is often scary. A
powerful, timeless, and necessary book for our current and future
generations.