City Beasts - Fourteen Stories of Uninvited Wildlife

Informationen zum Autor Mark Kurlansky Klappentext All-new stories about the urban worlds where animals and humans fight! love! and find common ground! from the nationally bestselling author of Cod and Salt. In these stories! Mark Kurlansky journeys to his familiar haunts like New York's Central Park or Miami's Little Havana but with an original! earthy! and adventurous perspective. From baseball players in the Dominican Republic to Basque separatists in Spain to a restaurant owner in Cuba! from urban coyotes to a murder of crows! Kurlansky travels the worlds of animals and their human counterparts! revealing moving and hilarious truths about our connected existence. In the end! he illuminates how closely our worlds are aligned! how humans really are beasts! susceptible to their basest instincts! their wildest dreams! and their artful survival. Leseprobe ALSO BY MARK KURLANSKY   In time he understood that nature was not something outside the human world. The reverse is true. Nature is the real world, and humanity exists on islands within it. ODD BIRDS IN NEW YORK Some 6,000 years ago the people in Mesopotamia created the first written language. At first it was simple line drawings. They developed about 2,000 characters, all pictures of objects. After about 2,000 years the written language, now known as cuneiform, had developed into wedge-shaped symbols, dashes put together in different configurations. Each of these geometric characters represented an idea or often just a sound. Mesopotamian society revered the elite few who could write and read these texts, which were written on clay tablets. If these scribes were revered, birds were sacred animals because their feet left messages in clay that resembled cuneiform but were another language, one even the scribes could not read. Perhaps the messages were intended only for other birds. Far up in the northern regions of New York City, in a place known as the Bronx, in what was called a zoo, was a huge birdcage made of metal, wrought and twisted and crafted to perfection. In the cage lived some of the most beautiful birds in the world, including a bright green quetzal from Guatemala. The quetzal didn’t know that he was originally from Guatemala, just like he didn’t know that he now lived in the Bronx. Nor did he understand the idea of a zoo. But he may have suspected that he was beautiful. For most of his life he had lived in this tall cage with laurel branches to perch on and all the avocado he could eat. There were also other birds from different places or maybe the same place. He didn’t really know. This quetzal had been in the Bronx for so long that he no longer remembered the green highlands of his birth, and he was not unhappy where he was. He was a quiet bird who kept to himself, often spending hours on a branch without moving until everyone forgot he was there. But he had a friendly look, his close-cropped fuzzy green plumes setting off his little round head. Hairless monkeys, some with hair on the tops of their heads, came to the cage to see the birds and they always liked the quetzal when they could spot him. He tried not to be spotted and they never harmed him. Late at night there were screams of faraway monkeys—loud, shrill notes held for long seconds. But it was in the distance and not very troubling. The quetzal had a vague notion that nights were much noisier in his native land. He liked the quiet night in the Bronx. But now he was hearing an odd creak. He heard it again. He looked up at the bolted metal struts of the cage, the only sky he could remember, and suddenly the cage began to fall in. Birds screeched and squawked and chirped the news: the aviary was collapsing. Metal was crashing to the ground louder than monkey screams, and feathers seemed to be everywhere. The quetzal had only one thought—he had...

Info autore

Mark Kurlansky

Dettagli sul prodotto

• Autori: Mark Kurlansky
• Editore: Riverhead
• Lingue: Inglese
• Formato: Tascabile
• Pubblicazione: 03.02.2015
• EAN: 9781594485879
• ISBN: 978-1-59448-587-9
• Pagine: 320
• Dimensioni: 132 mm x 197 mm x 17 mm
• Categorie: Narrativa > Romanzi; Narrativa > Romanzi > Saggi, articoli culturali, critica letteraria, interviste