Build Me an Ark: A Life with Animals

In this unusual and captivating memoir, we find a woman who grew up in the wilderness as the daughter of a forest service ranger. From an early age Brenda Peterson built intimate relationships with wild animals, forest floors, and even old growth elder trees. As a result, she has adventures aplenty, but she does not follow the swashbuckling, high-risk male model of nature writing. Whether writing about looking into the eyes of a gray wolf or spying on a clan of dancing grizzly bears, readers see a new, more feminine model for living with and protecting animals--one that is built upon the connective tissue of wonderment and compassion.

The upshot is a nature writer who manages to present great spirit within great stories. She imagines animals having afterlives and speaks to the shape-shifting myths that link two endangered predators--the orca whale and the gray wolf. When Peterson finds herself in the most dangerous place possible--between a mother bear and her cubs--she survives the encounter by standing tall in her power as well as her reverence. "Ever so slowly, my heart pounding, I stood up to my tallest height," she writes. "Our eyes met. 'It's just me,' I said in a soft voice, not the bold declaration I'd been grilled to do by instinct whenever faced with a wild bear. 'And you.'" Like a solidly built ark, it is Peterson's respect for the animal kingdom that carries this hopeful and globally inspiring memoir. --Gail Hudson