100 Books Like The Puma Years

This book helped me release shame after a colleague of mine told me my work wasn’t “science.”

Here’s the truth: to create a healing platform, I needed to tap into ways of thinking that academia sees as “woo woo” and “savage.” I looked to the stars. I meditated. I did rituals and read myths.

Dr. Kimmerer, trained as a traditional botanist, realized that the Indigenous myths and stories she was told as a child contained scientific knowledge passed down for generations by her tribe.

She realized there were scientific truths her community knew for millennia that traditional scientists only discovered within the last 100 years. This is the power of Ancestral Intelligence, disregarded by the same science that ultimately created AI.

What stories, fables, and myths have taught you valuable lessons about the world?

An unforgettable book about the power of women restoring themselves and each other and how that will also help us restore the Earth. Full of mythology, If Women Rose Rooted is about women seeking our roots and rootedness. While seeking a place to live, the author is also searching for the true place within herself. Blending memoir, the land, and folk stories, this book can help women everywhere come home to themselves. 

While there has been some controversy about the science in Simard’s book, there’s no doubt that it’s a great read that juxtaposes Simard’s personal life with her scientific life.

I was drawn to her personal story, which takes place in both government and academic spheres. I cried with her when her brother passed away, and I was proud with her when her daughter said she might want to study forestry at university.

The mix of science and memoir works well in this book, showing how the two are inextricably entwined. I was impressed by how hard Simard worked to keep her family together, particularly when she was a professor at UBC in Vancouver, and they were living in Nelson.  

I absolutely loved this book. One of the most beautiful stories I’ve ever read, it’s heartfelt and hilarious. After running his own bookshop in Seattle, Andrew Bloomfield moves to Hollywood to become a screenwriter and discovers a colony of feral cats living in his backyard. He was not a cat person. After witnessing one too many raccoon and coyote attacks and hungry, crying kittens, he and his two female housemates intervene and start caring for these wild yet vulnerable cats who transform his life. With his sharp wit and keen eye for detail, Bloomfield is a brilliant storyteller. I got completely caught up in the soap-opera dramas and death-defying moments of these cats, along with the heartaches and triumphs of rescuing them.

Amory wrote this wildly entertaining read of his rescue of a stray he found sick and starving in a NYC alley on a snowy Christmas Eve in 1977. He named the white cat Polar Bear, a moody curmudgeon with one blue and one gold eye, who became his lifelong companion. The book spent 12 weeks at #1 on The New York Times bestseller list and sold over 10 million copies. Amory was a fierce and famous activist who helped Captain Paul Watson of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society buy a boat to use in his fight against whaling and seal-hunting. In 1980 Amory founded the Black Beauty Ranch in Texas, a refuge for discarded and neglected animals, from cats, dogs, deer, horses to elephants, monkeys, and big cats. That same year, he spent over $500,000 to trap 582 burros and helicopter them out of the Grand Canyon to save these… show more.

A beautifully told story about a Namibian family who created a real-life Noah’s Ark in the desert. Marieta van der Merwe and her late husband Nick turned their cattle ranch into a refuge for thousands of wounded or orphaned animals who can’t make it on their own in the wild. This book, full of wonder and gentle souls, has special meaning for me. I met Barbara Bennett, a North Carolina University literature professor, when I was sent to Namibia to write a story about Harnas Wildlife Sanctuary for the Guardian and we were both volunteering. Afterward, I introduced her to my New York literary agent who sold the book. It’s so vividly written that it allowed me to relive my experiences of daily mischief of the baboons, walking full-grown lions in the desert, sleeping with cheetahs under the stars, and watching the giant thunderstorms on the porch with a menagerie… show more.

Lost Cat centres around the author’s two 13-year-old tabbies, Tibia and Fibula, named after the bones and nicknamed Tibby and Fibby. Caroline was recovering from a plane crash, healing broken bones, and sinking into depression when Tibby disappears. Hobbling on crutches and painkillers, she and her partner Wendy, the illustrator of the book, begin their frantic search flyposting their San Francisco neighbourhood, touring animal shelters and feral-cat colonies before moving on to GPS tracking and animal psychics and pet detectives. Weeks later, Tibby saunters back home with the smug confidence of Jacques Costeau after a wild adventure to parts unknown. Caroline, also an animal-rights activist, poignantly captures the deep, elusive kinship between us and our animals. Cat people will understand this obsessive behaviour in this warm, funny memoir that, along with the gorgeous full-colour pen-and-watercolour drawings, is a fantastic feel-good read.

To Speak for the Trees is one of my favorite books ever, partly because I love trees, and partly because of my own Celtic heritage from my maternal line. Diana Beresord-Kroeger, a scientist in biochemistry and botany, begins with her childhood in Ireland. After losing her parents at a young age, she is raised in the ancient Celtic nature wisdom and Druid beliefs by an entire community, and literally taught the language of trees: Ogham. Blending scientific discoveries about trees and the importance of forests to our species' survival, this book is a fast and delightful read that I won’t forget. I feel enriched from having been blessed to spend time with such a brilliant woman through the pages of her book. 

This beautiful photography book is deeply moving. Subtitled Portraits of Elderly Animals from Farm Sanctuaries, it was inspired by Leshko’s encounter with Petey, a 34-year-old Appaloosa horse. His aged body was the first of the photos for this collection; all are quietly magnificent. They drew me into contemplation of both the plight of farm animals and Leshko’s personal quest to accept aging; she hopes to face her own eventual decline “with the same grace and stoicism the animals have shown.” I’ve spent time volunteering at an animal sanctuary, and have a special connection to Ruby, a Standardbred mare who turned 30 in April 2022. She had a hard life, and her age shows in the hollows over her eyes and her grizzled cheeks, but it’s immeasurably comforting to know she will live out her remaining days in dignity. 

I loved the brash daring of this novel by an unknown writer of my own generation that I first read in the manuscript. I don’t believe it has yet gotten its due. Sarah Falkner has taken the near-familiar twentieth-century mise en scène of the Alfred Hitchcock-ish animal thriller movie and created characters in starlet Kitty Dawson and her son Rory who create their own inventions with this space.

Kitty founds a big cat sanctuary, and Rory trains as a lion tamer and turns this into performance art. Throughout, I felt like I was in a live-action museum of Post-War American Psycho-Cinema, powered by Falkner’s mimicry of discourses–interviews, publicity releases, film theory, and memoir–and the blend of excitement for film, language, and compassion for animals and their magnificence.