Wild Nights: Nature Returns to the City

by Anne Matthews

Book Overview

Matthews conducts a walk on New York City's truly wild side and gives a glimpse of the landscape of the future as she explores the resurgence of nature within the city. With deer in Manhattan, coyotes in the Bronx, and wild turkeys flying down Broadway, she shows how nature stubbornly reasserts itself even in the most violently resculptured terrain.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0865475601
• ISBN13: 9780865475601
• Release Date: January 2001
• Publisher: North Point Press
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.88 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.7" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

A different kind of walk on the wild side!

Anne Matthews has a keen wit & eye for the absurd & a strange rollicking turn of phrase that keeps you loping along, even as you gasp for a second wind.Consider the horseshoe crab in the sandy coastal waters off New York, Delaware Bay & the Yucatan. their mad annihilation will grip your heart. An unusual book with a unique perspective of our roaring cities with much to think about, much to chortle over & much, much about which to be regretful. The author writes much of history, urban & rural, architecture & locations, plagues & sewage, city limits & elastic boundaries. She quotes Darwin & Whitman, mayors & statisticians & the quiet, unassuming rescuers of the lost, beaten & bruised city wildlife.Consider the billions of migrating birds that rush over North America twice a year, seeking breeding grounds & winter homes ... you can stand on Wall Street in the wee hours & listen to the migrants calling, faint & high, as they stream above the sleeping city.Very, very well done - you should give yourself a treat & buy this one for your city nights will never be the same after you've spent a few hours with Anne Matthews on her walkabouts during her Wild Nights.

A terrific read

This is very rewarding nonfiction...it makes you laugh AND think. The writing is excellent: fact made poetry. Having sources at the end seems OK...especially since this is a book that gets better and better (though considerably darker) as it proceeds. The stories about animals in the city are charming, but what stays with you are the long-term implications of nature's return to our overconfident world.

Eye-opening and delightful

I found this book to be a wonderful introduction to an important issue--the inexorable return of nature to our comfortable and often clueless urbanized/suburbanized lives. Matthews uses New York as an example, and does so in ways that charm and alarm. Her accounts of towerkill on Wall Street, peregrine life in midtown, horseshoe crabs in Brooklyn, the uptown Feast of Saint Francis, the environmental history of New York City, and the quest to reclaim Penn Station from the Jersey swamps are particularly well-done. But I found the book as a whole both perceptive and fair, as well as being extremely well-written: for instance, she offers a number of predictions about city futures, but makes it clear that the actual future will almost certainly surprise us--and in perhaps unpleasant ways. "Wild Nights" manages to delight and instruct, but never preaches or gets self-righteous, simply lays out the current arguments and invites you to make up your own mind. Once you finish "Wild Nights" (IF you read it carefully, and with an open heart and mind) you will never look at a city, any city, the same way again. The author's funny, angry vision of what we have done to ourselves made me think of "Silent Spring"--another book that made a great many people with cherished agendas and preconceptions intensely angry and defensive, but proved, in the end, all too accurate.

If you care about the world your children inherit...

People who may dislike this book, but should read it anyway: Real-estate developers. Self-satisfied urbanites, suburbanites, and exurbanites. Anyone who doesn't believe in global warming. Anyone who thinks nature is boring--or predictable. People who will truly enjoy "Wild Nights": Anyone who appreciates literate, deft nonfiction. Anyone who loves nature--yet knows that nature may not necessarily love us. Anyone interested in seeing the world's greatest city through a new lens. Anyone fascinated by how the past and the present intertwine. Anyone who worries about what kind of world we may be leaving our children and grandchildren.

Literary Journalism of a very high order

Reader Kaplan is much mistaken. "Wild Nights" is not a tour book, not a field guide, but literary journalism of a very high order: original, scrupulous, informed, and moving, a skillful blend of environmental history, public policy, natural observation, and poetry. Anne Matthews' surface topic is the increasing presence of nature in greater New York and other cities, but her subtext, always, is the future of urban civilization. "Wild Nights" is a brilliant complement to her two previous books, "Where the Buffalo Roam" and "Bright College Years," both also studies of American places undergoing rapid yet largely misunderstood change. I read Matthews with enormous pleasure, assign her books to my students, and put her on the same pedestal as John McPhee, Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe, Annie Dillard, and other great contemporary nonfiction writers.