Böcker av Boria Sax

A superbly illustrated overview of our long relationship with our feathered friends.

In 1985 Boria Sax inherited an area of forest in New York State that had been purchased by his Russian Jewish Communist grandparents as a buffer against what they felt was a hostile world. For Sax, in the years following, the woodland came to represent a link with those who lived and had lived there, including Native Americans, settlers, bears, deer, turtles, and migrating birds. In this personal and eloquent account, Sax explores the meanings and cultural history of forests from prehistory to the present, taking in Gilgamesh, Virgil, Dante, the Gawain poet, medieval alchemists, the Brothers Grimm, the Hudson River painters, Latin American folklore, contemporary African novelists and much more. Combining lyricism with contemporary scholarship, this book opens new emotional, intellectual, and environmental perspectives on the storied history of the forest.

Though people generally do not think of them in such terms, crows are remarkably graceful: from the tip of a crow's beak to the end of its tail is a single curve, which changes rhythmically as the crow turns its head or bends toward the ground. This book presents a survey of crows, ravens, magpies and their relatives in myth, literature and life.

Filled with beguiling images throughout, Lizard is a unique and sometimes surprising introduction to this popular but little-understood reptile. Boria Sax describes the diversity of lizard species and traces the representation of this reptile in cultures worldwide.

In this illuminating discussion of the role of animals in Western thought, the author shows, through his analysis of folklore, popular ideas, and natural history, that man's traditional fascination with animals is more than it appears. Professor Sax asserts that 'animals put us in touch with modes of perception that are prior to culture. Encounters with animals compel us to question what it means to be human.'