| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Jon T. Coleman. Vicious: Wolves and Men in America. (Western Americana Series.) New Haven: Yale University Press. 2004. Pp. xv, 270. $28.00.
In this book, Jon T. Coleman asks three simple questions: "Why did European-Americans hate and destroy wolves for centuries? Why did they treat the animals so cruelly? And, given the ferocity of their emotions and conduct, why have Americans recently tried to protect and restore the predators?" (p. 2). These questions may sound simple, but they are not, because when Coleman titled his book Vicious, he was not talking about wolves, even though the ones in Yellowstone occasionally rip out fetuses from cow elk after having dragged them down and eviscerated them. This looks plenty "vicious" from the sidelines, but wolves kill to feed themselves and their families—they struggle for material "transcendence," as Coleman has labeled it, jazzing up the old notion of survival—while humans inflicted pain and death for different reasons, ones more about intellectual transcendence.	1
As humans sought to pass down forms of immortality through the generations—principally, "progeny, property, and folklore"—they waged a war against wolves. What makes this book so compelling is that, to craft his argument regarding transcendence, Coleman mobilizes an array of historical, cultural, and biological theories. Coleman can pull this off because he knows his history and biology and is a gifted writer. Capable of transcendence himself, Coleman writes so well that he makes his provocative interdisciplinary approach look commonsensical. By the end of the book, one is forced to ask: "Shouldn't all environmental histories be written like this?"	. . .

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