Customer Reviews

Beauty Within the Beast: Kinship with Bears in the Alaska Wilderness

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Beauty, personality, kin, children, learning beings--what a picture of these brown bears we are given, by Dr. Stringham. The previous reviewer (blessed282) has describe the beautiful attributes of this book well. I can only add: It is wonderful. I can't wait for his next one!

Few of us will ever have the opportunities that Dr. Stringham has had, to live intimately with wild animals on a daily baisis and observe them close at hand. Dr. Stringham has written an enchanting and engaging accout of raising three wild bear cubs in the Alaskan wilderness. Bears have been revealed as intelligent and adaptive creatures who occupy a unique niche in the American wilderness, comparable to the niche primates occupy in Africa. This book is exciting, highly readable and hard to put down. Dr. Stringham is not only a gifted wildlife biologist, but a gifted writer; his descriptions are beautiful. I love this book, as has every other person I know who has had the fortune to read it. Christine Nicolayeff

Reading this book was a privilege. The author writes with a sensitive and wonderfully descriptive style. I found myself fascinated from the moment I picked it up until I put it down. It is at once an adventure, and a love story of an unusual kind. In reading this book, I felt his reverence for wild animals, particularly for bears, and I learned to look at them as something far more than I had before. I was not overwhelmed by the science in the book, because it was so skillfully interwoven with his description of raising three black bear cubs. Dr. Stringham has created a treasure, and I highly recommend it.

As many in this world know, very few will experience the Bear. Dr. Stringham skillfully shares his experience with the Ursus kind in a manner which allows the laymen to touch this creature in the comfort of the armchair.

I have much respect for what Steve has done, both in this book and his career, and hope that my words may spread the message that is contained in this book. I truly know that this will become a classic; in the true spirit of Michio Hoshino...Please write more Steve!

This, the first of Dr. Stringham's many wildlife books, chronicles the beginning of his pioneering research on bear behavior and psychology. Even if your interest in bears doesn't go any deeper than mere curiosity, don't start this book unless you have time to read it cover to cover. For it will hook you quickly and never let you go until you learn the fate of its real life characters. The book's wealth of fascinating scientific discoveries is woven into the story of his romance with Alatanna, their wedding, and their instant parenthood when they adopted three orphaned bear cubs. At some moments adorable, and at other moments little hellions, these cubs soon found a place in the hearts of Steve and Alatanna, much as they all find a place in the reader's heart. These are not cute teddy bears or party animals in fur coats -- as the late Tim Treadwell used to say. They are fundamentally wild animals living in deep wilderness; animals who demand our respect, much as they offer their own; animals who give us trust, while hoping that we will have the capacity to reciprocate. This is a story of communication and bonding across the gulf between our two species, and of the humans and animals who struggled, and eventually succeeded, in spanning that gulf. In so doing, they disprove the common myth that the safest bears are those that fear people -- a myth directly contradicted by statistics proving that most serious or fatal attacks on humans are not offensive, but defensive, the result of too much fear rather than of too little. As these cubs and their fully-wild kin demonstrate time and again, the safest bears are those which both respect and trust people. (Respectful bears expect people to retaliate against any aggression. Trusting bears expect that people won't attack without provocation and warning.) Not only is this book a pleasure to read in its own right, but it whets the reader's appetite for more knowledge about bears -- which Stringham provides in a series of other books, including "Bear Viewing in Alaska," "Alaska Magnum Bear Safety Manual," and "When Bears Whisper, Do You Listen?" Hundreds of pages of additional writings by Stringham can be found in the website of the Bear Viewing Association: bear-viewing-in-alaska.info . This is a great read for both adults and kids.

Surprising someone would go to all the effort to write such a boring book. He seemed to have his heart in it when he talks about the bears, but when it includes people, he loses it. I threw it in the trash where it belongs. I normally recycle everything.