Elizabeth Marshall Thomas Libri

I cani pensano? Provano desideri e angosce, vivono gioie e amarezze, ambizioni e rimorsi? Per rispondere a queste domande Elizabeth Marshall Thomas ha osservato i suoi cani per oltre trent’anni, e lo ha fatto senza cercare di «addomesticarli»: ha offerto loro ospitalità, cibo e acqua, li ha seguiti nei loro lunghi vagabondaggi tentando di individuarne i pensieri e le emozioni, di scoprire quali fossero le leggi cui obbedivano. Il risultato di questa attentissima osservazione è racchiuso in questo libro, un’affettuosa «biografia» di undici cani, ognuno dei quali dotato di una personalità e di un carattere assolutamente unici.

Milano, Longanesi, 2001, 8vo legatura editoriale cartonato telato con fregi e titoli dorati al dorso e sovraccopertina illustrata a colori, pp. 299 con numerosi disegni nel testo (stato di nuovo) .

From the revered author of the bestselling The Hidden Life of Dogs, a witty, engaging, life-affirming account of the joy, strength and wisdom that comes with age.

Elizabeth Marshall Thomas was nineteen when her father took his family to live among the Bushmen of the Kalahari. Fifty years later, after a life of writing and study, Thomas returns to her experiences with the Bushmen, one of the last hunter-gatherer societies on earth, and discovers among them an essential link to the origins of all human society. Humans lived for 1,500 centuries as roving clans, adapting daily to changes in environment and food supply, living for the most part like their animal ancestors. Those origins are not so easily abandoned, Thomas suggests, and our modern society has plenty still to learn from the Bushmen. Through her vivid, empathic account, Thomas reveals a template for the lives and societies of all humankind.

Focusing on the dynamics between dogs and their human families, the author draws from her experiences to explore canine behavior and communication. As an anthropologist, she addresses common questions about dogs, such as the significance of their barks, challenges in house-training, and the intriguing relationships between dogs and cats. Through engaging anecdotes from her own household, she provides insights into how dogs have adapted to coexist with humans and each other, enriching our understanding of these beloved pets.

“A study of primitive people which, for beauty of . . . style and concept, would be hard to match.” — The New York Times Book ReviewIn the 1950s Elizabeth Marshall Thomas became one of the first Westerners to live with the Bushmen of the Kalahari desert in Botswana and South-West Africa. Her account of these nomadic hunter-gatherers, whose way of life had remained unchanged for thousands of years, is a ground-breaking work of anthropology, remarkable not only for its scholarship but for its novelistic grasp of character. On the basis of field trips in the 1980s, Thomas has now updated her book to show what happened to the Bushmen as the tide of industrial civilization—with its flotsam of property rights, wage labor, and alcohol—swept over them. The result is a powerful, elegiac look at an endangered culture as well as a provocative critique of our own."The charm of this book is that the author can so truly convey the strangeness of the desert life in which we perceive human traits as familiar as our own. . . . The Harmless People is a model of the style very simple and precise, perfectly suited to the neat, even fastidious activities of a people who must make their world out of next to nothing." — The Atlantic