George Schaller’s Wild Life; Sara Wheeler Review of Homesick for a World Unknown for the Wall Street Journal

“How can we live alongside animals in the 21st century?” Miriam Horn makes a convincing case that we should listen to the pioneering zoologist George Schaller.

Until the 1960s, Ms Horn writes, most zoologists had ‘studied only specimens on cold tables, or broken creatures in shackles or cages.’ Mr. Schaller upended the dogma by observing animals in their own habitats [aiming] at ‘the remaking, or recovery, of our understanding of animal consciousness.’ Ms. Horn conveys the healing value, in a broken world, of solitary communion with nature. After watching thousands of antelope flow over the Tibetan steppe, Mr. Schaller wrote, ‘for a brief time I was free again.'”

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