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| The Hopes of Snakes: And Other Tales from the Urban Landscape | 
| Author: Lisa Couturier
Publisher: Beacon Press
Category: Book
List Price: $14.00
Buy Used: $3.50
You Save: $10.50 (75%)
New (17) from $8.14
Avg. Customer Rating:  6 reviews
Sales Rank: 569424
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 159
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.5 x 0.5
ISBN: 0807085650
Dewey Decimal Number: 508
EAN: 9780807085653
ASIN: 0807085650
Publication Date: January 12, 2006
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: standard reading wear
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| Customer Reviews:
| Showing reviews 1-5 of 6 | | NEXT » |
Nature Writer of the Year July 15, 2008
Lisa Couturier writes with great power and sensitivity, pulling the reader in, teaching and thrilling and spinning a yarn like no other nature writer. Along the way, the words tumble together in new ways, and the charm and delight flows in a torrent. In the end, we are moved, we have learned, and we want more. I hope you will share my delight with this book, and share it with friends. I've bought about 30 copies that I've given away to people I knew would enjoy it.
This book is just so great that ZipcodeZoo.com named Lisa Couturier Nature Writer of the Year.
Poignant tales for our times April 16, 2006
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I live near an eight-lane freeway, and every time I hit the onramp, I look for the red-tailed hawk that can be seen most days scanning for his prey from his perch on a light pole. He would no doubt prefer better hunting grounds than this ice plant thatch that shelters suburban rodents, but after we humans filled in the nearby wetlands and covered the hills with house tracts, this is about all we've left for him. My daily glimpse of him is a vitamin to me, and a reminder that I don't have to travel to a national park to have an encounter with wildlife.
For readers who routinely seek soul-restoring encounters with all that is wild, Lisa Couturier's The Hopes of Snakes will be a tonic. To refer to this book as a collection of essays would create a far too stuffy impression of it. Part of the subtitle, Tales from the Urban Landscape, pegs it precisely: this is a collection of personal reminiscences, musings, meditations and analyses that make for darn good storytelling. The common thread that stitches together all of these tales with a seamless cohesiveness is Couturier's abiding respect for wild animals, many species of which are scorned and hated when they edge themselves back into habitats that were stolen from them by humans.
True to its title, there are uplifting tales here, not just of snakes, but of coyotes, turkey vultures, pigeon ladies, and many others. Nevertheless, this is not an anthology of sticky-sweet, cute animal stories. The overriding tone is one of reverence, not sentimentality. Even so, Couturier's poignance is often moving, and when you read "Take the Long Way Home," a posthumous letter of thanks to Mr. Boyd, Couturier's neighbor and mentor of her high school years, you just might find yourself shedding a tear or two.
Even in the deepest heart of a city, the animal world is all around us, as my freeway redtail reminds me every day. The Hopes of Snakes will help you rediscover, in case you ever forgot it, that despite all our collective efforts to turn wilderness into "civilization," humankind does not exist in isolation from our animal kindred.
A celebration of the underlying world of animals June 7, 2005
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Students of urban natural history and casual readers alike receive a celebration of Northeast urban wildlife in The Hopes Of Snakes & Other Tales From The Urban Landscape. Her thirteen essays observe urban animals from Manhattan skyscraper-dwelling falcons to mice who live on the subway tracks of New York. Wildlife has adapted to human habitations in surprising ways: hers is a celebration of the underlying world of animals which live alongside people.
Living with our fellow creatures April 6, 2005
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
Lisa writes about her experiences with wildlife that occupy cities and suburbia and how they interact with humans. As Lisa writes, some animals fare very well while others do not.
Lisa's ability to capture small details about the cirtters with whom she interacts make her essays all the more endearing and important. Although accused of anthropomorphising about the surivivors of the Human onslaught, her descriptions present an important understanding of urban wildlife and enable many otherwise unknowing citydwellers the opportunity to engage with nature's cast outs.
As Julie Warner said in Doc Hollywood: "Most people are merely on the Earth, not a part of it." Lisa Couturier gives us the opportunity to experience first hand those rare species that share their world with the Human invaders.
Have You Ever Read a Book You Wished Would Never End? April 5, 2005
8 out of 8 found this review helpful
The Hopes of Snakes is just such a book. From Manhattan to Washington, DC, Lisa Couturier takes her readers on an amazing journey by introducing us to things we may have taken for granted or may never have thought twice (or even once) about. As I have been reading the essays, my family and friends have had to endure my reading passages or quoting from the text, but none acted as though it were much of a struggle because the prose so ably draws one in.
Ms. Couturier not only writes with the beauty of a poet, she teaches along the way so that the reader comes away feeling thoughtful and enriched. I knew nothing about crows other than myths, but now, because I have read A Banishment of Crows, I look for them in the sky, count their numbers, am awed by and respect them.
In her essay, The Hopes of Snakes, she becomes the readers' hero because she does what we wish we could do in similar circumstances.
The essays reflect humor and sorrow and never shy away from the unpleasant. By the end, the reader closes the book, feeling fulfilled by the journey, and yet compelled to assert onself more fully in the environment so that not a moment is lost and the connection will remain.
I have hopes that this will be the first of many books by Lisa Couturier.
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Wildlife, nature and the Environment
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