Born Naked Farley McGill Mowat
Cena: 16,00 zł
Key Porter Books , stan db+ (lekko podniszczona okładka), str. 262
For those who have come to know the public Farley Mowat, the kilted, high-spirited entertainer, this gentle memoir may be a revelation.
In Bom Naked, Mowat describes with singular clarity an extraordinary childhood. His parents. Angus and Helen, were each in their way, powerful figures: she was at once frail, enduring, and unfailingly tender; he, headstrong, thoughtful, and deeply eccentric. They raised their son in circumstances that were modest, at least in the earliest years, in a time when the world was wracked by economic depression. They were not easy times and Farley's was not a cossetted childhood. The affection which suffuses this memoir, however, is ample evidence of the strength of the family bond.
He was bound to be different. Marked by a name that other boys invariably rendered as "Fartley," and a diminutive physique that ruled out participation in most sports, he became solitary. An only child, he might have become self-absorbed, had he not discovered the world of the "Others." Animals exercised a fascination for him from his earliest years. There is an element of the mystical to this attachment. He recalls a dream of a bear that was dressed as a man and wonders now if he had not stumbled into the bear's dream. He remembers the reputation he enjoyed - and encouraged — as one who could communicate with wild animals. The intimate relationship he developed with a succession of pets, from the fabulous mongrel, Mutt, and the great horned owl, known as Wol, to a black squirrel, numberless white rats, various snakes, and a pathologically vicious sea bird, all contributed to the making of the future naturalist and author.
There are, in this tale, moments of unbridled hilarity: his discover)' by dissection of a hairy woodpecker's testes, subsequently triumphantly
displayed to his parents' dinner guests; his pel sistent habit of collecting bits of dead fauna with odoriferous, and occasionally catastrophic, consequences; and his experiments, predictable in outcome, with explosive chemicals.
But Bom Naked is also a voyage into innocence. It is a voyage that begins when Angus and the family set sail in what may well be the original camper trailer. Laboriously constructed by Angus out of white oak and cedar planking on the undercarriage of a Ford truck, "the Ark" made its slow way from Windsor, Ontario, to Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, when Farley was just twelve years old. On the prairies they found themselves in a new world altogether: the sky was as wide as the land was flat and the wildlife overwhelming. Here, Farley Mowat set the course that has remained steady over the intervening years, even as the world changed, and the wildlife slowly disappeared.
This is a wry, clear-eyed, sad, and very funny memoir by one of Canada's finest writers.
Farley Mowat, author of such distinguished books as Neper Cry Wolf, A Whale for the Killing, Sea of Slaughter, and most recently, My Father's Son, has long been eloquent in his indictment of man's exploitation of both human a,nd non-human life. He was born in Trenton, Ontario in 1921 and began writing in 1949 after serving in the Second World War and subsequently spending two years in the Arctic. More than 14 million copies of Farley Mowat's many books have sold worldwide and he has been published in 52 languages. Farley Mowat lives in Port Hope, Ontario, and River Bourgeois, Nova Scotia with his wife, writer Claire Mowat.
For those who have come to know the public Farley Mowat, the kilted, high-spirited entertainer, this gentle memoir may be a revelation.
In Bom Naked, Mowat describes with singular clarity an extraordinary childhood. His parents. Angus and Helen, were each in their way, powerful figures: she was at once frail, enduring, and unfailingly tender; he, headstrong, thoughtful, and deeply eccentric. They raised their son in circumstances that were modest, at least in the earliest years, in a time when the world was wracked by economic depression. They were not easy times and Farley's was not a cossetted childhood. The affection which suffuses this memoir, however, is ample evidence of the strength of the family bond.
He was bound to be different. Marked by a name that other boys invariably rendered as "Fartley," and a diminutive physique that ruled out participation in most sports, he became solitary. An only child, he might have become self-absorbed, had he not discovered the world of the "Others." Animals exercised a fascination for him from his earliest years. There is an element of the mystical to this attachment. He recalls a dream of a bear that was dressed as a man and wonders now if he had not stumbled into the bear's dream. He remembers the reputation he enjoyed - and encouraged — as one who could communicate with wild animals. The intimate relationship he developed with a succession of pets, from the fabulous mongrel, Mutt, and the great horned owl, known as Wol, to a black squirrel, numberless white rats, various snakes, and a pathologically vicious sea bird, all contributed to the making of the future naturalist and author.
There are, in this tale, moments of unbridled hilarity: his discover)' by dissection of a hairy woodpecker's testes, subsequently triumphantly
displayed to his parents' dinner guests; his pel sistent habit of collecting bits of dead fauna with odoriferous, and occasionally catastrophic, consequences; and his experiments, predictable in outcome, with explosive chemicals.
But Bom Naked is also a voyage into innocence. It is a voyage that begins when Angus and the family set sail in what may well be the original camper trailer. Laboriously constructed by Angus out of white oak and cedar planking on the undercarriage of a Ford truck, "the Ark" made its slow way from Windsor, Ontario, to Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, when Farley was just twelve years old. On the prairies they found themselves in a new world altogether: the sky was as wide as the land was flat and the wildlife overwhelming. Here, Farley Mowat set the course that has remained steady over the intervening years, even as the world changed, and the wildlife slowly disappeared.
This is a wry, clear-eyed, sad, and very funny memoir by one of Canada's finest writers.
Farley Mowat, author of such distinguished books as Neper Cry Wolf, A Whale for the Killing, Sea of Slaughter, and most recently, My Father's Son, has long been eloquent in his indictment of man's exploitation of both human a,nd non-human life. He was born in Trenton, Ontario in 1921 and began writing in 1949 after serving in the Second World War and subsequently spending two years in the Arctic. More than 14 million copies of Farley Mowat's many books have sold worldwide and he has been published in 52 languages. Farley Mowat lives in Port Hope, Ontario, and River Bourgeois, Nova Scotia with his wife, writer Claire Mowat.