Richard King's The Devil's Cormorant is a brilliant book. It is scientifically well-informed, serious, funny, and full of good stories...a post-modern ornithology.
Behold the cormorant: silent, still, cruciform, and brooding; flashing, soaring, quick as a snake. Evolution has crafted the only creature on Earth that can migrate the length of a continent, dive and hunt deep underwater, perch comfortably on a branch or a wire, walk on land, climb up cliff faces, feed on thousands of different species, and live beside both fresh and salt water in a vast global range of temperatures and altitudes, often in close proximity to man. Long a symbol of gluttony, greed, bad luck, and evil, the cormorant has led a troubled existence in human history, myth, and literature. The birds have been prized as a source of mineral wealth in Peru, hunted to extinction in the Arctic, trained by the Japanese to catch fish, demonized by Milton in Paradise Lost, and reviled, despised, and exterminated by sport and commercial fishermen from Israel to Indianapolis, Toronto to Tierra del Fuego. In The Devil’s Cormorant, Richard King takes us back in time and around the world to show us the history, nature, ecology, and economy of the world’s most misunderstood waterfowl.
Richard King's The Devil's Cormorant is a brilliant book. It is scientifically well-informed, serious, funny, and full of good stories...a post-modern ornithology.
Splendid and eclectic.
Despite the subtitle, this is a work as much about human history and values, as it is about nature. King sees past the symbol and presents the real cormorant, living amidst real people. And one is left with this conclusion: Surely we need animals as symbols. But let’s not allow it to obscure the real, complicated, beautiful creatures among us.
King teases out this relationship from multiple perspectives--literary, historical, artistic, ornithological, political--in a book that is informative, personable, and fascinating.
Entertaining and thought-provoking. . . . Eloquent and expansive.
RICHARD J. KING is senior lecturer in literature of the sea with the Maritime Studies Program of Williams College and Mystic Seaport. He is the author of Lobster.
Founded in 1971, Brandeis University Press is a nonprofit publisher dedicated to publishing innovative, high-quality books for a general audience, as well as scholarship that advances knowledge and promotes dialogue in the humanities, arts, and social sciences around the world.
© Copyright 2024, Brandeis University Press
Brandeis University Press
Goldfarb Library 69-235, MS 046
Brandeis University
415 South Street
Waltham, MA 02453
(781) 736-4547
pressinfo@brandeis.edu
Stay up to date with the newest titles and promotions from Brandeis University Press—while saving 20% on your first purchase.