Cannonball Read 12

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Search This Site

> FAQ Home
> Tag: animal behavior

Civilization sucks

Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George

by Leave a Comment

CBR11bingo: Youths! Julie of the Wolves is the story of a 13-year-old Eskimo girl in Alaska named Miyax who is torn between the “old ways” of the traditional Eskimo people and the new ways that are taking hold of the larger communities in Alaska. When the novel opens, Miyax is lost on Alaska’s North Slope, having run away from home. Hungry and desperate, she attempts to communicate with a wolf pack, ingratiating herself to them until they accept her as one of their own. The […]

One of my favorite subjects

Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? by Frans de Waal

by Leave a Comment

My unerring interest in animal behavior sometimes has me wondering whether I should have become a wildlife biologist. If I were only braver and smarter, maybe I could have been a new Jane Goodall, spending my life in the woods and learning about a completely different species. But my interests are never persistent or steady enough to commit to anything like that. So I have to satisfy this interest with some occasional reading. I recently read Animal Wise by Virginia Morell, which I found both eye-opening […]

Animals are people, too, or people are animals, something like that

Animal Wise by Virginia Morell

by Leave a Comment

Sometimes I think I should have been some kind of wildlife biologist/animal behaviorist. But not one that performs experiments or has to kill its research. I’d rather just watch and observe. In Animal Wise: The Thoughts and Emotions of Our Fellow Creatures (2013), Virginia Morell answers the question of whether animals are able to think and feel by describing studies done with a number of different animals. If you asked me when I was in kindergarten whether animals had thoughts or emotions, I would have said ‘of […]

A Haunting Tale about the Human/Animal Equation

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler

by 3 Comments

A laugh-out-loud/cry-out-loud tale designed to illuminate our lives and prick our conscience. It is the story of Rosemary, who begins her story “in the middle,” saving the big reveal for later. Rosemary is at college when the novel begins, suffering from a lack of friends, a lack of self-esteem and from a huge gaping hole inside her dating back to when she lost her twin sister Fern at age five, her beloved older brother Lowell not too long afterwards, and watched her father descend into […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo
  3. Google Pay