Cry of the Wild: Eight Animals Under Siege

This wonderfully unconventional work of creative nonfiction from Foster (Being a Human), a law professor at Oxford University, draws on scientific research to provide novelistic accounts of how rabbits, otters, and other animals are facing the challenges of living in a human-dominated world. The stories impart both scientific background on their animal subjects and hauntingly intimate perspectives on their plights. For instance, Foster depicts orcas’ capacity to “experience a prolonged grief” by describing a pod’s deranged behavior after a collision with a container ship killed their matriarch (“Their speech and their jumps were flat, they sometimes groomed one another manically and sometimes forgot to groom at all”). The author personifies his subjects without lapsing into saccharine anthropomorphizing, as when he provides a Gladiator-worthy account of a fox’s battles against other males for the approval of a female in heat (“Before she submitted, teeth had to be sharp, reflexes brisk, endurance endless, desire ablaze”). Elsewhere, Foster discusses eels’ struggle to reproduce amid rising infertility caused by pesticides and a pair of gannet birds’ futile efforts to incubate eggs, whose fatally thin shells likely resulted from the parents’ ingestion of pollutants. Foster is the kind of effortlessly adept writer likely to drive other authors to envy, and his bold gamble to break the scientific taboo around imagining animals’ interior lives pays off magnificently. Readers will be awed. (May)