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A review by pleasereadittome
The Beast in the Garden: The True Story of a Predator's Deadly Return to Suburban America by David Baron
5.0
[4.5 stars] David Baron’s nonfiction account of how mountain lions descended the Rocky Mountain foothills into Boulder, Colo., neighborhoods is the best environmental nonfiction book I’ve read, and, quite frankly, one of the finest nonfiction books I’ve read – and that’s a genre I frequent.
Seemingly unfazed by humans, the mountain lions’ natural hunting instincts shifted from deer to domestic animals, and over the course of two years residents would witness an ever-escalating ecological calamity that would come to a head on a running trail.
Baron presents the events as a tense, slowly unfolding disaster complete with disagreeing citizens, unconcerned politicians and a few people determined to raise the alarm. If you replaced the great white shark in “Jaws” with a group of mountain lions, the plot of that movie (I haven’t read the original) and this book would be eerily similar.
Unlike Timothy C. Winegard’s “The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator” and Dan Egan’s “The Death and Life of the Great Lakes,” that often lacked focus and bogged the reader down with minutiae, Baron keeps the narrative tight and focused.
While some chapters might contain a few pages about the United States’ history with mountain lions, or President Theodore Roosevelt’s legacy of conservation that influenced modern approaches to human and wildlife symbiosis, the focus stays on Boulder in the late-1980s and early-1990s, and the political and environmental situation that led to the proliferation of urban mountain lions.
While Baron does have a few writing flourishes that seemed a bit extra – for example, he starts one chapter with “Two days after the old year yielded to the new…” – the narrative is well-researched, accessibly written, and frankly, terrifying. Oftentimes while reading about the mountain lion encounters my pulse raced.
This is a nonfiction book that on the surface appears to be about one, rather niche micro-history, but it speaks to a bigger discussion – how humans are impacting wild animals from the ice caps to our backyards.
As someone that’s lived in densely populated areas my entire life, the assorted rabbits, squirrels, chipmunks, birds – both of song and prey – and the occasional deer, opossum or raccoon don’t raise many alarms. But the decisions we make about our “land” can have devastating consequences to our local ecosystem. Reading this raised my “think global, act local” consciousness.
Seemingly unfazed by humans, the mountain lions’ natural hunting instincts shifted from deer to domestic animals, and over the course of two years residents would witness an ever-escalating ecological calamity that would come to a head on a running trail.
Baron presents the events as a tense, slowly unfolding disaster complete with disagreeing citizens, unconcerned politicians and a few people determined to raise the alarm. If you replaced the great white shark in “Jaws” with a group of mountain lions, the plot of that movie (I haven’t read the original) and this book would be eerily similar.
Unlike Timothy C. Winegard’s “The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator” and Dan Egan’s “The Death and Life of the Great Lakes,” that often lacked focus and bogged the reader down with minutiae, Baron keeps the narrative tight and focused.
While some chapters might contain a few pages about the United States’ history with mountain lions, or President Theodore Roosevelt’s legacy of conservation that influenced modern approaches to human and wildlife symbiosis, the focus stays on Boulder in the late-1980s and early-1990s, and the political and environmental situation that led to the proliferation of urban mountain lions.
While Baron does have a few writing flourishes that seemed a bit extra – for example, he starts one chapter with “Two days after the old year yielded to the new…” – the narrative is well-researched, accessibly written, and frankly, terrifying. Oftentimes while reading about the mountain lion encounters my pulse raced.
This is a nonfiction book that on the surface appears to be about one, rather niche micro-history, but it speaks to a bigger discussion – how humans are impacting wild animals from the ice caps to our backyards.
As someone that’s lived in densely populated areas my entire life, the assorted rabbits, squirrels, chipmunks, birds – both of song and prey – and the occasional deer, opossum or raccoon don’t raise many alarms. But the decisions we make about our “land” can have devastating consequences to our local ecosystem. Reading this raised my “think global, act local” consciousness.