For an excerpt and pubisher's coupon on the book Crow, click on the image:
Book Proposal: City of Ravens: How ravens came to the Tower of London, why they stayed, what they tell us about nature and humankind
Introduction to the Course: Animals and Human Civilization at UIS,
Winner of the AS award for the "best new course" of 2007
"...our current estrangement from animals seems to revive some of the numinous qualities they had in the archaic past. They connect us with a history in which people often seemed to live on a grander and more heroic scale than they do today. Now the discipline of ecology makes animals guardians of the ecosystem, and their fate is linked with that of human beings. Ecologists count frogs or butterflies to learn about a possible apocalypse; these researchers are a bit like the ancient priests of Greece or Babylon who would foretell the future from the flight of birds. Scientists have tried to decipher the languages of animals from bees to monkeys.
Every animal is a tradition, and together they are a vast part of our heritage as human beings. No animal completely lacks humanity, yet no person is ever completely human. By ourselves, we people are simply balls of protoplasm. We merge with animals through magic, metaphor, or fantasy, growing their fangs and putting on their feathers. Then we become funny or tragic; we can be loved, hated, pitied, and admired. For us, animals are all the strange, beautiful, pitiable, and frightening things that they have ever been: gods, slaves, totems, sages, tricksters, devils, clowns, companions, lovers, and far more. "
From The Mythical Zoo by Boria Sax
With gratitude to Mary Lozina for help with the design of this site