. . . .All Creatures Great And Gone. . . .

From today's Globe and Mail:

. . . Glavin's storytelling traverses the globe, from his home on Mayne Island in British Columbia to places as diverse as the Lofoten archipelago off the coast of Norway, the Amur River in Russia's Far East and the Patkai Range of the eastern Himalayas. Deceptively simple chapter subtitles — "A tiger," "A bird," "A flower" — serve as springboards for his roaming narrative.

Deceptively simple, too, is Glavin's description of his quest: "At a time when the world is filled with dread and foreboding, and when the great master narratives we've relied on to understand things are collapsing all around us, there should be some virtue in going for a walk through the hills and coming back at the end of the day with an account — a story — of what's out there."

One of the master narratives Glavin rejects is the one you'd expect to find in a book about extinctions: the language of environmentalism, which he characterizes as "wholly inadequate to the task" of describing the world's withering diversity. The key here, central to the book and the source of its exhilarating expansiveness, is that Glavin is talking not only of diversity lost at the level of wild plants and animals, but also at the cultural level of domesticated species, languages, traditions, human societies and local knowledge — in short, all the ways of seeing, knowing and being in the world.

That’s an excerpt from a review of Waiting for the Macaws, which appears in today’s Globe and Mail as the cover feature of the book section. I’d heard a big review was coming, so I was a bit nervous. Turned out just fine.

The reviewer is Lorraine Johnson, whose collection of essays about the Carolinian region of Ontario is due out this fall. Lorraine took the trouble to read my book and to think about it carefully, which writers of book reviews are not always so assiduous about doing. So thanks, Lorraine.

Also, the Globe and Mail online version today contains the book’s entire first chapter, Night of the Living Dead. Here’s an excerpt:

From Kublai Khan to the Mughal emperor Akbar the Great, and from the thirteenth-century Holy Roman emperor Frederick II to American press baron William Randolph Hearst, bigshots of one stripe or another have always employed vast animal collections in dispensing and procuring loyalties and allegiances, favours, and alliances. Among the bears, monkeys, and other animals Charlemagne kept at his various residences was an elephant given to him by the Caliph of Baghdad. Phillip VI of France, Louis IX, and England's Henry II all kept extensive animal collections, trading specimens as tokens of esteem and fealty.

In the ostentatious display of animals what's often at work is something deeply rooted in power, conquest, prestige, and domination. It can be as benign as the corporate sponsorship by Chemical Industries (Far East Ltd.) of the Malayan tiger viewing shelter at the Singapore Zoo (which sells such corporate sponsorships for 4000 Singapore dollars a year) or as savage as the excesses of the Roman emperors, who never flinched from the vices of debauchery. The Romans took the fetish to its most barbaric extremes. A single festival could involve the torture, maiming, and massacre of thousands of animals—bears, lions, giraffes, crocodiles, elephants, and bulls. If a few human beings were thrown into the bloodbath, all the more grisly and better the spectacle.

But captive humans would also sometimes suffice. In the sixteenth century, to impress the menagerie-fancier Pope Leo X, a Catholic cardinal kept a collection of humans. Among them were Tartars, Africans, Indians, and Moors. The bestiary of Aztec emperor Montezuma, not long before, had included an array of dwarfs and "human monsters" among his animals at Tenochtitlán. Europe's medieval travelling menageries were often complemented by displays of humans, and as recently as the nineteenth century, English people were regularly coaxed out of a few pence to see collections of Laplanders, African bushmen, Ojibways, and Inuit. Such travelling shows routinely included even more exotic human specimens: bearded women, "boneless" children, giants, and even less fortunate people billed merely as "humanoids." The carnival, the freak show, the zoo . . .