But what's great is the rest of the book! Always striving for authenticity, I read this book to hopefully get an insight into the ways that crows, ravens, and all those other corvids (I can smugly toss this just-learned term about like a blow-up doll) have influenced human culture (yes, yes, Poe fans, I hear you but, look, I'll be frank, the guy shagged dead people) and, yes!, there's a whole chapter on these birds' roles in religion, superstition, and culture, a chapter that is, in fact, wanting. I know fuck-all about birds of any sort (save the rhea, subject of my forthcoming African travelogue, "Ghana, Rhea: Travels with a Flightless Bird") but, the dictates of being a fiction-writer often mean that you don't get to read whatever you want, you have to read what you need. To a surprising extent, to know the crow is to know ourselves."
As the authors state in their preface: “Crows and people share similar traits and social strategies. In the Company of Crows and Ravens illuminates the entwined histories of crows and people and concludes with an intriguing discussion of the crow-human relationship and how our attitudes toward crows may affect our cultural trajectory. Examining the often surprising ways that crows and humans interact, John Marzluff and Tony Angell contend that those interactions reflect a process of “cultural coevolution.” They offer a challenging new view of the human-crow dynamic-a view that may change our thinking not only about crows but also about ourselves.įeaturing more than 100 original drawings, the book takes a close look at the influences people have had on the lives of crows throughout history and at the significant ways crows have altered human lives. Yet this influence is not unidirectional, say the authors of this fascinating book: people profoundly influence crow culture, ecology, and evolution as well. From the cave walls at Lascaux to the last painting by Van Gogh, from the works of Shakespeare to those of Mark Twain, there is clear evidence that crows and ravens influence human culture.
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