Homesick for a World Unknown
Bozeman resident and world-renowned wildlife biologist Dale Miquelle, who led the longest-running field study on endangered Siberian tigers, commended Horn’s reporting, which involved combing through more than 20,000 pages of field notes and shelves of photo albums, and going into the field with Schaller twice.
Armed with Schaller’s report, Olaus Murie persuaded President Eisenhower to sign an executive order protecting the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
“Homesick for A World Unknown” a Wall Street Journal Editor’s Choice
Homesick for a World Unknown by Miriam Horn is selected by The New York Times for their list of 6 books recommended by their critics and editors.
In her engaging, lyrical “Homesick for a World Unknown,” Miriam Horn tells the story of the famed naturalist George Schaller.
“…a scientist as original and unrelenting in his own quest [as Stephen Hawking] … considered by many the most effective conservationist of the past century”
In her meticulously researched, gripping biography, Horn conveys how Schaller’s work in the Congo revolutionized our understanding of gorillas and, more broadly, of methodology for ethological field work.
The first scientist to perform detailed, sustained field studies of once-inaccessible animals in the wild, from Serengeti lions to mountain gorillas, Schaller revealed the lives of creatures long thought monstrous or mysterious.
“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.
“Schaller was years ahead of his time … While most other 20th-century scientists viewed non-human species as devoid of feeling or complexity, Schaller was convinced that animals possessed inner lives much like our own and [that] the surest path to discovering these hidden worlds was to meet animals on their own terms. His research laid…