COYOTE NATION: A Natural and Supernatural History by Dan Flores paints the coyote’s history and its clashes with Homo sapienx as “a nature story where nature wins!” — despite a century of trying to wipe coyotes out, they’re thriving more than ever.
Flores covers the coyote’s role in indigenous legend (something I’ll come back to in a later post), it’s evolutionary history (no, it’s not a species of jackal), and the European colonists and explorers having early encounters with the “prairie wolf.” In the 19th century things took a turn for the worse as Americans began seeing the coyote as a cowardly, sneaky, no-good varmint (Mark Twain vents on this line in Roughing It). It didn’t matter: coyotes adapted to us just fine. When various wildlife agencies began butchering wolves (Flores shows protecting livestock was an excuse to justify a much larger budget), coyotes adapted to that too (wolves have been known to prey on them), expanding their range and growing in number. Eventually that led to the same agencies justifying continued big budgets by killing them too, at various times using poison, bear traps and shooting them from the air (one “researcher” explains sheep farmers, the main ones demanding this, want to see corpses rather than being told sterilizing adults gets the job done).
Again, coyotes won. Unlike wolves, they can hunt as pack animals or go solo after small prey, giving them more options; they’re even able to eat vegetables. Coyote howls are a guide to population density: if they don’t hear many of their kind, they produce larger litters. Suck it, killers. While solidly on the coyotes’ side, Flores does thing we should be hostile when we encounter them in urban areas — keeping them afraid of us minimizes things going bad.
It’s an excellent book though when Flores gets away from the core subject his science is wonky — Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene is not about the genetic basis of selfishness, for instance.
I’ve learned that tahini, the basis of hummus, has a lot of uses in cooking — in many recipes that use peanut or other nut butter, it makes a tangy alternative, for instance. That led me to check TAHINI BABY: Bright Everyday Recipes That Happen to Be Vegetarian by Eden Grinshpan out of the library. I’ve made one — a fruit dish with a tahini/oat crumble on top — and might try a couple more before I take it back, including a variation on regular hummus. Others simply aren’t practical for someone who relies heavily on leftovers (I have that problem a lot) — a shakshuka sandwich with poached eggs isn’t something I want to leave in the fridge. And there’s not quite as many tahini recipes as I was hoping for — still, it’s a good book if your taste runs to Israeli/Middle Eastern cooking.
Despite the title, William K. Everson admits his CLASSICS OF THE HORROR FILM: From the Days of the Silent Film to the Exorcist isn’t attempting to pick the best of the best as much as to select a wide array of great films. Overall I think he succeeds as he looks at Frankenstein, The Undying Monster, Night of the Demon and The Exorcist.
This 1974 book did its job as it whetted my interest for a number of the films contained within. Enough I can live with the times I disagree strongly — he doesn’t care for Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein and while he’s delighted to see a modern horror movie make big bucks, he dismisses The Exorcist as more shock than art. Overall, interesting, though dated by coming out before cable, VCRs, DVDs and now streaming made many movies he laments are never seen easily available.
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