The Man Who Lives with Wolves
by Penny Junor, Shaun Ellis
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Book Summary Information
Author: Penny Junor, Shaun EllisEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2009-10-20
ISBN: 0307464539
Number of pages: 288
Publisher: Crown
Book Reviews of The Man Who Lives with Wolves
Book Review: Who Studied Who?
Summary: 3 Stars
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
If you love wolves, you will like this book. If you find self-taught, naive wild men intriguing, you will like this book. But if you are a scientist, or well read, or like a detailed adventure story supported by interesting facts, you will not like this book so much. Still, I'm glad I read it. It was fun to discover that the leader, best hunter and pup caretaker of the pack are all roles done by females.
Shaun Ellis and his cowriter, Penny Junor, have written a mishmash of bits and pieces of Shaun Ellis's life and experience that lacks cohesion and depth. Containing too many ungrammatical sentences, letting too many scenes simply drop, is not good or clear writing. Growing up in a fractured family with an emotionally missing mother, he did what all of us do when we become adults: go in search of what was lacking in childhood.
I believe a certain wolf heard his call and sent him a message, which he received unconsciously. It tickled, teased and pummelled him until he consciously began to act on it. The high point of his re-education came when he actually was invited to join a pack of wild wolves in Idaho. The real story here is not the handful of new knowledge Ellis brought back from his adventures with wolves but how he found healing with them for his life.
In his work with wolves, Ellis has always been at odds with the biologists in the field. That's because he doesn't have their college degrees, their detailed note-taking abilities, and, let's be honest, because many of them were jealous. The hardships Ellis endured to stay with his pack were something most of us could never manage. But when you are on a deep soul quest to heal your life, the pain of which is driving you to hell, then any sacrifice or suffering is worth it if you find freedom and joy, love and peace in the end. Happy to say, it appears Ellis did. He turned his back on his family, his children and everyone he knew to be with the wolves. They brought him full circle. It was their job.
It is too bad that in the process of his learning he let the scientists influence him a tad too much and the Native Americans he so admired a tad too little. He paid more than lip service to the prevailing left brain "scientific method" and I have to wonder if he told the whole truth. Or did he have experiences he has kept quiet about because people would laugh or not believe him? Is he not familiar with Temple Grandin's book, "Animals In Translation" or the work of Rupert Sheldrake, himself a biologist?
Grandin was a "hopeless autistic" who grew up to become a world renowned authority on animal behavior partly because she realized that autism connected with how animals think and feel. In particular, she has laid down some pretty convincing evidence that it was "The Wolf" who taught early homosapiens how to form families, how to hunt and how to be civilized.
Sheldrake has done extensive, repeatable and reliable studies on animal telepathy, proving beyond doubt that animals can read our minds, know our intentions and communicate with us.
I found it rather hilarious when Ellis writes of waiting months for an encounter with a wolf, only to brush off both the howling invitations and the several encounters with a wolf who was telepathically inviting him to follow. Ellis makes much of body language in wolves and how he learned to behave within the tribe as he tried to insinuate himself into their structure while at the same time teaching them about human behavior. I imagine they might possibly have preferred him to bathe and change clothes. I think our wolf friends had a few laughs on him and maybe had to make things harder for him because he wasn't getting it telepathically.
What was Ellis doing all those months he was alone in the mountains? What was he thinking? Feeling? No adventures, missteps? He doesn't say. He uses no words that would make sense to us, possibly because they are taboo words in a scientist's world, words like love, like joy. He often says that wolves are not sentimental, misusing the word, I think. It means having a refined or tender sensibility pertaining to love, pity, or nostalgia. I do not know of one mammal who does not have these feelings, yes, emotions, including wolves. There have been thousands of stories over the years of animals displaying these attitudes and I have witnessed a few myself. The totality of any life form is far more than mere biology.
Possibly Shaun Ellis is a right brained man who got snookered by society into igoring it and used only his left brain to report on the wolves he so clearly loves. Living with them, you'd think he would not be capable of writing a sentence with the words, "if we could begin to be responsible, the animals beneath us would become responsible." I take issue with the word "beneath."
Perhaps that attitude is why Ellis came up with so little to report about. J. Allen Boone's "Kinship With All Life" might enlighten him further about his interactions with them. Thinking with one's heart, provided one has a good heart, is always superior to thinking with one's brain, no matter what the situation. Intuition is more truthful than knowledge. In the end I think the wolves taught Shaun Ellis far more about Shaun Ellis and life than he taught them.
Summary of The Man Who Lives with Wolves
What would compel a man to place himself in constant danger in order to become a member of a wolf pack? To eat with them, putting his head into a carcass alongside the wolves' gnashing teeth? To play, hunt, and spar with them, suffering bruises and bites? To learn their language so his howl is indistinguishable from theirs? To give up a normal life of relationships and family so that he can devote himself completely to the protection of these wild animals?In The Man Who Lives with Wolves, Shaun Ellis reveals how his life irrevocably changed the first time he set eyes on a wolf. In exhilarating prose, he takes us from his upbringing in the wilds of Norfolk, England, to his survival training with British Army Special Forces to the Nez Percé Indian lands in Idaho, where he first ran with a wolf pack for nearly two years.
Offering an extraordinary look into the lives of these threatened, misunderstood creatures, Ellis shares how he ate raw kill?and little else; washed rarely, and only in plain water; learned to bury his face into the carcasses of prey?and, when necessary, to defend his share of the kill; communicated with the pack by his howls and body language, which over time became seemingly identical to theirs; and observed from this unique vantage point how wolves give birth to and raise their young, and enforce order among the pack.
After years of living in the wild, Shaun Ellis was barely able to recognize the feral face that stared back at him from the mirror. And in The Man Who Lives with Wolves, we discover the life of a rare and fascinating man who abandoned civilization but never lost touch with his humanity.
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