A walk on New York City's truly wild side -- and a glimpse of the landscape of the future. Deer in Manhattan, coyotes in the Bronx, wild turkeys flying down Broadway: among the traffic and tall buildings of America's most urban terrain, another city -- suppressed and segregated during daylight, exceedingly lively from twilight to dawn -- has begun to stake a new claim. Wild Nights takes a startling tour of this other New York, revealing how stubbornly nature reasserts itself in even the most violently resculpted terrain. In the first urban period in human history, confrontation and competition with the natural world is becoming an everyday occurrence. Some encounters charm us; some we dread; some we badly misunderstand. Anne Matthews explores them, examining the implications of this unexpected and powerful resurgence of nature for the fate of a world of megacities and suburban hypersprawl. Animated by her keen wit and eye, and anatomized by the often warring theories of scientists, historians, and environmentalists, New York emerges as a case study in civilization on the brink of ecological overreach. Other urban civilizations, in other centuries, reached such points of no return. As Matthews reminds us, most disappeared. Whether nature gets to bat last depends on our understanding one of the oldest, hardest lessons in human history: wild doesn't always mean natural, and urban is rarely the same as tame.

Wild Nights: Nature Returns to the City

Anne Matthews

FSG/Northpoint

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Books by FSG/Northpoint

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the FSG/Northpoint publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Wild Nights: Nature Returns to the City