Bears: A Brief History Book

Ok, let's list all the non-textual reasons I gave this book five stars.

1) In hardcover, the book was a beautifully sized 8 1/4 by 5 inches, which I haven't really encountered in American books, but is an extremely comfortable size (and portable) size.

2) Maybe it was to pad out the relative brevity of the book (236 pages), but it had really big lovely margins on the outside of the text. About an inch, which comes to (by the above dimensions) about 20% of the width of the page. I haven't seen this before, but it made reading the book extremely satisfying. Pages were easy on the eyes, and you had a sense of quick progress, even though it had just reduced the number of words per page.

3) The book is littered with fascinating illustrations, sketches, and early lithographs of bears, many of them tucked neatly into those big margins.



The text itself is well written and concise, an amalgam of anecdotes and history that sketch our Brunner's inquiry into how humans have identified with or categorized bears over the course of their existence. Most interestingly, he shows how humans have always identified strongly with bears, especially in Europe and North America, where knowledge of apes was especially scant and bears seemed like our closest relative in the animal kingdom.

Some choice bits:

On page 25 I learned that the word berserk derives from the Old Norse "berserker", warriors who served Odin and were turn into bears when enraged. ("Beri"=bear, "serkr"=shirt, "berserker"= clothed as a bear.)

On page 98, I learned that despite being primarily solitary, bears communicate with one another by rubbing their scent on areas or scratching trees, often to mark a watering hole or a deer crossing.

And this mind blowing little tidbit from pages 107-108:

...the Ainu captured cubs and kept them until adulthood... One aspect of the Ainu's dealings with bears however, has tended to disturb folklorists or to be dismissed by them: in Ainu traditional society the women were responsible for raising the bears they captured. Ainu women... cared for the animals with great patience and also frequently nursed them -- a practice that was not at all "secret"... The Ainu are not the only women to have nursed bear cubs. Samuel Hearne... reported that "it is common for the Southern Indians to tame and domesticate the young [bear:] cubs... the Indians oblige their wives who have milk in their breasts to suckle them."

Holy. Crap. This is why I read, for little gems like that last passage which blur the lines on how I thought the world worked.