Customer Reviews

Wild Nights: Nature Returns to the City

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Anne Matthews has a keen wit & eye for the absurd & a strange rollicking turn of phrase that keeps you loping along, even as you gasp for a second wind.

Consider the horseshoe crab in the sandy coastal waters off New York, Delaware Bay & the Yucatan. their mad annihilation will grip your heart.

An unusual book with a unique perspective of our roaring cities with much to think about, much to chortle over & much, much about which to be regretful. The author writes much of history, urban & rural, architecture & locations, plagues & sewage, city limits & elastic boundaries. She quotes Darwin & Whitman, mayors & statisticians & the quiet, unassuming rescuers of the lost, beaten & bruised city wildlife.

Consider the billions of migrating birds that rush over North America twice a year, seeking breeding grounds & winter homes ... you can stand on Wall Street in the wee hours & listen to the migrants calling, faint & high, as they stream above the sleeping city.

Very, very well done - you should give yourself a treat & buy this one for your city nights will never be the same after you've spent a few hours with Anne Matthews on her walkabouts during her Wild Nights.

This is very rewarding nonfiction...it makes you laugh AND think. The writing is excellent: fact made poetry. Having sources at the end seems OK...especially since this is a book that gets better and better (though considerably darker) as it proceeds. The stories about animals in the city are charming, but what stays with you are the long-term implications of nature's return to our overconfident world.

People who may dislike this book, but should read it anyway:

Real-estate developers. Self-satisfied urbanites, suburbanites, and exurbanites. Anyone who doesn't believe in global warming. Anyone who thinks nature is boring--or predictable.

People who will truly enjoy "Wild Nights":

Anyone who appreciates literate, deft nonfiction. Anyone who loves nature--yet knows that nature may not necessarily love us. Anyone interested in seeing the world's greatest city through a new lens. Anyone fascinated by how the past and the present intertwine. Anyone who worries about what kind of world we may be leaving our children and grandchildren.

I found this book to be a wonderful introduction to an important issue--the inexorable return of nature to our comfortable and often clueless urbanized/suburbanized lives. Matthews uses New York as an example, and does so in ways that charm and alarm. Her accounts of towerkill on Wall Street, peregrine life in midtown, horseshoe crabs in Brooklyn, the uptown Feast of Saint Francis, the environmental history of New York City, and the quest to reclaim Penn Station from the Jersey swamps are particularly well-done.

But I found the book as a whole both perceptive and fair, as well as being extremely well-written: for instance, she offers a number of predictions about city futures, but makes it clear that the actual future will almost certainly surprise us--and in perhaps unpleasant ways. "Wild Nights" manages to delight and instruct, but never preaches or gets self-righteous, simply lays out the current arguments and invites you to make up your own mind. Once you finish "Wild Nights" (IF you read it carefully, and with an open heart and mind) you will never look at a city, any city, the same way again. The author's funny, angry vision of what we have done to ourselves made me think of "Silent Spring"--another book that made a great many people with cherished agendas and preconceptions intensely angry and defensive, but proved, in the end, all too accurate.

Reader Kaplan is much mistaken. "Wild Nights" is not a tour book, not a field guide, but literary journalism of a very high order: original, scrupulous, informed, and moving, a skillful blend of environmental history, public policy, natural observation, and poetry. Anne Matthews' surface topic is the increasing presence of nature in greater New York and other cities, but her subtext, always, is the future of urban civilization. "Wild Nights" is a brilliant complement to her two previous books, "Where the Buffalo Roam" and "Bright College Years," both also studies of American places undergoing rapid yet largely misunderstood change. I read Matthews with enormous pleasure, assign her books to my students, and put her on the same pedestal as John McPhee, Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe, Annie Dillard, and other great contemporary nonfiction writers.

This is definitely a book about nature for people who think they can't stand nature prose. Not at all sentimental, wonderfully written, full of startling facts, 'Wild Nights' is a lovely and terrifying portrait of the wild New York hiding in plain sight. The last chapter makes me want to move out of the city immediately--but where? As Matthews reminds us, nature was here first, we've pushed it much too hard, and now it's pushing back, globally, locally. Hard as it is for our species to accept, nature always wins.

The Boston Globe review of this book is posted at : http://www.dianamuir.com/default/BG062201.html

I was engrossed with the facts and thrilled by the many directions of the witty style of Anne Matthews and found "Wild Nights" thoroughly entertaining and very informative. And, having lived in "Gotham", I can attest to the accuracy of much of the content. It's thought provoking how much is missed when we don't remember to reflect on the sequence of events. Anne Matthews has captured a linear progression of history, natural and other, and displayed it interestingly. One star omitted due to the last chapter's jaunt to Armageddon.

What I liked: There were many interesting stories about how human society and wildlife have interacted over time. There's the guy who catches falcons on New York sky-scrapers, in order to tag and track them, or the folks intrepidly searching for bits of an old railroad station where they've been dumped in the New Jersey Meadowlands.

What annoyed me were the wild, almost hysterical visions of potential dystopian nightmares of what may happen to cities, particularly New York, and humankind at large, in the near future. While I personally found the claims plausible and interesting, I was frustrated at the utter lack of any annotation to back them up.

After recently reading some hard-hitting, well-researched, and utterly fascinating commentaries on the modern world economy: Eric Schlosser's "Fast Food Nation" and Naomi Klein's "No Logo," both of which present a well organized stream of thought-provoking claims, backed by footnotes, Anne Matthew's novel felt like listening to a well-read savant rambling on, at random, about how interesting her life's work is to her, at least. The sort of person you politely listen to rant away, take a few interesting scraps down to carry with you, and then politely disengage yourself from. In short, she's better heard in the occasional segment on NPR than in an entire novel.

The book feels like the product of a researcher who has slapped together bits and pieces of personal notes as they came to her, with no thought towards editing them together or cross-referencing them with source material, in order to push through to the publisher to meet a deadline.

... and yes, this book is totally New York-centric, to an annoyingly exlusionary degree; I'll be gifting mine to a cute NYU student as a gift.

From coast to coast with most of the concentration in New York, Anne takes us on a journey into the lives and habits of a more knowledgeable and sophisticated animal world within our cites. Just like humans, the urban animal in a lot of cases, has adapted to the helter-skelter urban enviornment; and in some cases better than humans have.

A wonderful read in language most of us can understand, this book flows from man's early mistakes to the animal's amazing solutions.

The next time we look out of the bus or elevated train window on our way to work, and see that Sparrow or crow fighting the family pet for the dog food, we'll know what an alternate food source means.

Highly recommended.