Adam's Task: Calling Animals by Name - Hardcover

Hearne, Vicki

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0394542142 ISBN 13: 9780394542140

Publisher: Random House USA Paperbacks, 1986

Synopsis

Explores the idea of communication between people and animals--from the sophisticated experiments of Washoe to common household pets--and suggests a relationship between understanding animal consciousness and expanding human consciousness

About this title

Review

"[A] fascinating, incisive work of moral imagination." —Susan Sontag

"When Ms. Hearne relates a dog or horse story, the animals become full-fledged characters, as brightly delineated as people created by Dickens or Twain. . . . [Her] passion for her subject, along with her eclectic intelligence and technical expertise, succeeds in making even the most skeptical reader re-evaluate his relationship with animals and his preconceptions about communication. . . . Adam's Task stands as a most intriguing and original book." —Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

"There is no finer book than this one about the way language entwines humans and animals." —Audubon Magazine

"A beautiful, wonderful book . . . that permanently refreshes thought and feeling." —Boston Globe

"As witty, wise and rare a book as has come along in some time." —San Francisco Chronicle

"This wonderful book will become essential to anyone who chooses to live with a horse, dog, or cat." —David Leavitt

"A fascinating and often surprising discussion of animal-human encounters." —Atlantic Monthly

"This engrossing treatise on animal behavior and interspecies communication provides an astute and possibly unique synthesis of a domestic animal trainer's practical knowledge and the intellectually more distant and even sterile theories of the academic world." —Library Journal

"Through luminous anecdotes, she . . . develops rigorous and beautiful descriptions of the transactions between animals and people, what they entail, and what the expectations—on both sides—are." —Publishers Weekly

About the Author

Vicki Hearne was an accomplished scholar of linguistics, literature, philosophy, and behavioral psychology as well as a poet. She was a professor at Yale University and operated a dog-training school for years in Westbrook, Connecticut.

Donald McCaig, the author of Jacob’s Ladder, Rhett Butler’s People, and Canaan. He and his wife, Anne, work a sheep farm in the western mountains of Virginia.

Karen Joy Fowler is a New York Times' bestselling author of six novels, including The Jane Austen Book Club and We Are Completely Beside Ourselves, which was shortlisted for the 2014 Man Booker Prize. She lives in Santa Cruz, California.

Edition details

• Publisher: Random House USA Paperbacks
• Publication date: 1986
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0394542142
• ISBN 13: 9780394542140
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 274