Why read Shimmer?

Book cover of Shimmer: Flying Fox Exuberance in Worlds of Peril

Book description

'I was called to flying-foxes. My research questions led me into multispecies ethnographic work involving wildlife carers and academically trained scientists in eastern Australia. The people I met were at the front line in the work of holding flying-foxes back from the edge of extinction. I continued to visit the…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Shimmer as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Gísli Pálsson

Author

I was deeply moved reading this book, a treatise about impending species death written by a fellow anthropologist facing her own death. The text freely moves back-and-forth between abstract reflections about life on the edge and observations on the mutual relations between indigenous Australians and flying-foxes (the only flying mammals in existence), now seriously threatened by both global warming and human encroachment.

This is not only a unique near-extinction saga; its language and framing took me straight into some of the biggest issues of our time, of what the author calls deathwork, the living dead, and double death, where death…

From Gísli's list on The best books that capture life on the edge.