Reviews

Eight Bears: Mythic Past and Imperiled Future by Gloria Dickie

mwmakar's review against another edition

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adventurous informative sad fast-paced

4.0

Realistic but tinged with hope and chock full of cool info. The Sun Bear situation is truly depressing, the panda cultural history is fascinating, kind of hopeful, and illustrative both of broader ecological stories & Chinese world-citizenry.

The book kept touching on, but not really broaching, the impacts to ecosystems of losing bears. Wolves are needed to trim deer populations, how do bears balance and cycle into their ecosystems?

gmd316's review

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adventurous challenging dark emotional informative reflective sad medium-paced

5.0

Loved this take on bears and how they intersect with so many social/political/environmentql issues . Very good narrative nonfiction

arhull30's review against another edition

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informative inspiring reflective sad fast-paced

5.0

I’m now both completely fascinated and terrified by bears, but I mean that in the best way! This was written with the perfect mix of anecdotes and facts, and had an engaging voice. I never once felt bored like I sometimes do with nonfiction. 

sdpannell's review against another edition

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adventurous hopeful informative inspiring reflective fast-paced

4.25

A fun read that focuses on the bears more than the author's experiences. I learned a lot and feel inspired to help how I can to preserve the 🐻🐻🐻

mountdesertisaak's review

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dark emotional hopeful informative reflective sad medium-paced

3.5

buck_e36's review against another edition

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informative fast-paced

4.0

megawhoppingcosmicbookwyrm's review against another edition

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challenging emotional informative reflective sad medium-paced

5.0

5 ⭐️s 
An absolutely amazingly well researched book that goes into the eight remaining bear species, their past, present and mostly bleak future. I cried several times. Had to stop taking it to work as my break time read. The bit about the sun and moon bears was especially hard to read. I knew the future of bears (like most things that share this planet with us) was dire, but this was certainly eye-opening. 
 
April’s #Naturalitsy read.

greggmpls's review against another edition

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adventurous informative reflective sad medium-paced

4.25

sindri_inn_arsaeli's review against another edition

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challenging informative medium-paced

4.25

cmcarr's review against another edition

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informative medium-paced

3.75

I was really interested to learn about the 8 remaining species of bears, and especially to understand how many species we've lost.  I know my neighbor Grizzly and Black bears fairly well, but was really interested to learn about some of the others like the Sloth bear, Sun and Moon bear.  The book is well researched and I learned a lot.  At times it felt a little random as to what aspects of the bear were focused on.  In theory, it was tied to the experience of the author visiting certain places and talking with certain people.  But I found myself wondering why there was a focus on certain parts of a bear's history (and present) and wondering what I was missing.  That being said, it was nice to have a manageable sized book to get a good grounding in the 8 species.  The bottom line is that bear relationships with humans have not worked out well for the bears, and many species are imperiled.