A tight, dense narrative, American Wolf races along like a predator on the hunt. Blakeslee takes readers into the snowy valley, and deep into a genuinely human tale told with the energy and verve of a best-selling thriller. That’s the question at the core of Nate Blakeslee’s new book, American Wolf: A True Story of Survival and Obsession in the West. Since the gray wolf was reintroduced to Yellowstone in 1995, conservationists and tourists have clashed with ranchers and hunters over how, exactly, predators and people should coexist. Most recently, this was personified in Cliven Bundy, whose two-decade-long miniature rebellion against paying grazing fees on public lands captured headlines when it grew into an armed standoff in 2014.įew of these fights have been as long-running or as divisive as the attempts at wolf repopulation in the Lamar Valley, a remote area within Yellowstone National Park. From the near extinction of the American bison in the late 1800s to the Sagebrush Rebellion over land management in the 1970s and ’80s, the West has always been a place where people and nature come into conflict. Since Europeans first ventured across the American West - equipped with rearms and a sense of godly duty to transform what they perceived as a savage wilderness - the region has been divided by tensions between conservation and development.
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