Born Naked

by Farley Mowat

Overview

Farley Mowat's outrageous memoir begins with his unlikely conception in a canoe and continues to his boyhood fascination with creatures of the natural world and on to his youthful rambles and adventures. To his immense pleasure and his parents' dismay, he adopted various beasts (whom he affectionately calls "The Others") as roomates. In this boyhood memoir, he recounts the exploits of this second family, who have been the subjects of many of his beloved books for young readers. This is the tale of a mischievous, immensely gifted young naturalist, recounted with the wisdom, humour and grown-up perspective of a very talented writer.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781771000925
Publisher:	Douglas and McIntyre (2013) Ltd.
Publication date:	06/14/2013
Series:	NONE
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Farley Mowat is an internationally renowned author and conservationist whose work has been translated into more than 50 languages. His bestselling books include Never Cry Wolf and Owls in the Family. He lives in Ontario, Canada.

Editorial Reviews

To his prolific and diversified body of work ( Never Cry Wolf LJ 9/1/63; My Father's Son , LJ 1/93), Mowat, now in his seventies, adds an autobiographical account of growing up in Canada during the 1920s and 1930s. This portrait of his youth, marked by humor, sympathy, and understanding, possesses the crystalline clarity, brightness, and color of a child's world--a world in which there already exist the beginnings of most of Mowat's experiences as nature writer and activist. There are no dull pages here; every man, woman, child, and animal mentioned even casually makes an impression. But the book is more than a family album or catalog of events. Out of it rises an authentic picture of Canadian life as it existed in the first half of the century. The book should stir up interest on both sides of the border and is highly recommended to all those who like good writing. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 12/93.-- A.J. Anderson, GSLIS, Simmons Coll., Boston

Library Journal

YA-Mowat begins with a well-written account of his first 12 years spent in various towns in southern Ontario, where his father served as a public librarian. Then they moved to Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, the setting for most of this book. There young Farley roamed the Canadian prairies, birding, hiking, camping, and tracking. His enthusiasm and love of the land and its animals are infectious; his knowledge, particularly of birds, is impressive. The growth of a young man is dealt with sensitively, and some of the incidents included are quite funny. The author uses his own childhood poems, letters, articles, and journal entries as well as those of others, namely his father and a maid, effectively. This is a book for any YA with even a passing interest in the outdoors and animals. Mowat's ability to put into perspective his sexual and social rites of passage is a talent that few writers can equal.-Clodagh Lee, Pohick Regional Library, Burke, VA

School Library Journal

The famous environmentalist's father, Angus Mowat, was the genteel product of dreamers and failures, but he made a respectable career for himself as a writer and a librarian. Angus and libraries, in fact, draw forth some of Farley Mowat's most entertaining anecdotes in this affectionate memoir of his childhood. Angus loved sailing. When he moved his family to landlocked Saskatoon and couldn't sail, he insisted on canoeing to town down the Saskatchewan River, then portaging his craft through city traffic to the library. The tales of Angus and Helen Mowat's early marriage, when Angus ran libraries in remote farmtowns, charmingly evoke Canadian rural life in the 1920s, while the Mowats' overland trek to Saskatchewan in the 1930s gives Farley's memoir a more somber note, portraying the effect on poor but enduring families of a double disaster: the Depression and the dust bowl. But primarily, these memories are of an inquisitive, bookish boy who loved animals: brown squirrels, white rats, birds of all kinds, bears, muskrats--even an alligator. Farley's account of a truck ride in subzero weather to a fur trappers' camp is particularly vivid, bringing to mind the wonder and savage innocence of his "Never Cry Wolf" (1963) and suggesting a basis for his animal-rights convictions. A mostly sweet memoir, and Mowat's many readers will not be disappointed.

John Mort