Customer Reviews:
 Poetic account of wildlife and environment in the Himalayas July 13, 2008
I am known as Bina Robinson rather than my legal name of Winifred. It just so happens that Bina is a fairly common name in this area making it
more approriate as well as more recognizable. So "I'd apreciate it if you'd make this change.
PLEASE OMIT THIS FIRST PARAGRAPH FROM REVIEW AFTER READING
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After reading Judy Smith's review, which skillfully captured the essence of this book in so few words, I decided not to comment. On thinking it over, however, it seems my personal experience of two treks, one lasting over a month, in Nepal gives me the background to add that the book should be of interest to anyone who has ever trekked or even dreamed of traveling on foot through the majestic Himalayas. I went for the mountains but came away with a love of the remarkable people who inhabit them, laughing and cheerful even when heavily burdened and barefoot in the snow.
George B. Schaller tells a well-rounded tale branching off at times into centuries of local history at various locations and philosophizing as when "Resting tranquilly near the bharal, I know also that animals are wild only because man made them so." He is concerned with the effects of overgrazing by domestic livestock causing slopes to be eroded leaving "shrubs perching on pedestals of soil, clutching the last fragments of fertility."
His description of village men "accustom(ing) the yaks to being handled again after a feral existence all winter" by talking gently to them and feeding them salt by hand reminded me of how other travelers passing a yak train reached out to give each animal an affectionate pat.
The purpose of the book is to present the notes of wildlife observations. often recorded with cold-numbed fingers during long days of watching at high altitude winter temperatures. These include trying to sort out classifications of animals with mixed characteristics of sheep and goats interspersed with exciting close encounters with shy snow leopards and descriptions, often poetic, of local birds and wild flowers and monastaries and dwellings, reminiscent of those of American Pueblo Indians, in spectacular surroundings.
I found Jean Pruchnik's sketches at the beginning and interspersed through each chapter very representational of my memories and Richard Kean's drawings of wild sheep and goats inside the covers more informative than photographs would have been. There was also a midsectiion of colored photographs taken by the author with a sampling scenery, animals and people.
Contents: April 15, 2004
10 out of 10 found this review helpful
The mountains of the Himalaya, from the lushly forested slopes of Nepal to the barren ranges of Central Asia, offer solitude, enlightenment, and incredible beauty, as well as the brutal reality of barren peaks and wind-torn slopes and glaciers. They are a lost world of nameless valleys, of people living in the Middle Ages, of travel by yak caravan. To field biologist George Schaller, the Himalaya is all this, and yet it is more, forming as it does the habitat of the world's greatest variety of whild sheep and goats....markhor, urial, bharal, and other spectacular animals...as well as the elusive snow leopard.
This is a story of high adventure, introspection, observation, and discovery. It is primarily about the Himalaya and the people and the animals that live in it. It is a story told in the words of a poet, yet seen through the eyes of a scientists, as he struggles to save this mountain world from turning to stones of silence.
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