Ever since I read the chapter about deer in Bethany Brookshire’s excellent Pests, I have hoped for an equally insightful book about our fraught relationship with this familiar neighbor. The Age of Deer is that book—and it is a masterpiece ... Her thoroughly researched and comprehensive book combines science, philosophy and history, delving into the role of deer not only as prey and pest but also as neighbor and artistic inspiration ... Howsare’s hands-on approach keeps her storytelling vivid and personal ... Somehow this book about deer captures a wide swath of 21st-century America.
Fascinating ... Understanding the ways these heroes of the human age have adapted to change may very well help us survive our own era of overabundance.
Howsare approaches the topic with a journalist’s open mind and a poet’s open heart; she is both. It is an absolute delight. There’s not a page on which the reader will not learn something, from the sublime (images of deer engraved in an English cave are considered the first Ice Age art found in Britain) to the absurd (some hunters buy bottled doe urine to attract their prey, including one whose label promises 'Powerful Sexual Attractor: Bring in the Bucks — AROUSED'). Yet the book is more than a cabinet of delights. Howsare engages thoughtfully with big ideas, from classical art and old myths of deer and deer-gods to the long, intertwined history of human beings and deer in North America, from pre-Columbian Indigenous folkways that shaped and affected deer population to the near-extinction that occurred after white settlers arrived.
A wide-ranging and deeply intelligent investigation ... [Howsare] tirelessly puts her boots on the ground and brings back surprising lessons ... Very much to her credit, Ms. Howsare refuses to insist upon a pat resolution about how we are supposed to treat deer, or even how to think about them.
A nature writer with a poet’s eye and a scholar’s acuity, Howsare catalogs the variety of ways the two species have interacted over time, balancing her personal observations with broad research that aims to move the needle from love-hate to understanding-acceptance.
Through carefully wrought prose and evocative imagery, Howsare depicts how deer and human populations have both relied on and butted up against one another for eons ... A thorough, eye-opening invitation to ponder our own relationships with the natural world, practically and reverently.
Fascinating ... She delivers sympathetic portraits of her brother, an avid hunter, and of hunting ranches, largely denounced by the hunting establishment, where customers pay a small fortune to shoot deer and other wildlife. Outstanding natural history writing.
The prose is elegant ('The buck seemed to flicker between life and death right there on the leaves. He was so beautiful and whole, but so still,' Howsare writes of a deer fatally wounded by a hunter), and her lyrical musings cast her subject in a new light, as when she describes deer as 'mashup-makers, remixers, [and] shape-shifters' for their skill at adapting to diverse environments: 'What animal could be a more perfect emblem for our own selves? Our precarious, fluctuating state?' Readers will be enthralled.
