On Being a Bear

January 15, 2021
French explorer, photographer, and writer Marion chronicles his fascination with bears of all shapes and sizes. The author opens with an evocation of the Baie de Seine, the delta where the river meets the English Channel, favorite turf of impressionist painters for its "temperamental skies, clouds, and waves." Entranced by nature at a young age, Marion has spent years visiting places such as northern Japan, Siberia, and Finland and studying the beliefs of hunting cultures about bears in the wild, often expressed as a kind of kinship with them. Having seen hundreds of polar bears in the wild, he professes a deeper fondness for the brown or grizzly bear, which is "polymorphic, in that there are several subspecies," such as the brown bears of Hokkaido, light brown in color and leaner and taller than other grizzlies. Marion warns against "simplistic anthropomorphism," but he doesn't always steer clear of sentimentalizing himself even as he ticks off the basic facts about each ursine variety--one of the more interesting is the fact that bears are, evolutionarily speaking, fairly new, appearing some 25 million years ago in the form of "a long-extinct fox-sized carnivoran mammal" called the "dawn bear." From this basic form came three branches of bears, including the pandas, the bears known to us today, and the long-gone but particularly fearsome short-faced bear. Marion considers those modern bears in a kind of semantic domain occupied by two other predators, the wolf and the wolverine. The gray wolf, he writes, "shares its entire territory with the brown bear" while the wolverine is more specialized. Interestingly, he notes, human muscle cells that are treated with bear serum become--well, superhuman, something a Marvel writer might want to run with. As for the rest, there's plenty of entertaining biology and anthropology alike in these pages. Those with a fondness for our shaggy fellow mammals will enjoy Marion's wanderings in the world of bears.

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March 1, 2021
Since the late 1980s, author and documentary filmmaker Marion has studied and photographed bears in the wild. Following polar bears and brown bears for days, the author came to see bears as a reflection of ourselves, of the way humans used to live. Marion's lyrical ursine profile concentrates mostly on the brown bear--whose scientific name, Ursus arctos, literally means ""bear bear"" in Latin and Greek--as the prototypical bear. He covers bear evolution, how they live their lives, and their relationship with their environment. His bear portrait is enlivened with memories and anecdotes about bears fishing, females teaching cubs, and his exploration of bear dens. Marion also quotes from fairy tales, ancient myths, First Nation rituals, and early scientists as he paints a complex picture of the relationship between bears and humans. The polar bear is featured in its own chapter, which becomes something of a polemic against arctic tourism and zoos. At the end of each chapter are boxed sections full of interesting bear factoids. Marion's obvious love for bears shines throughout this very readable primer on our ursine cousins.

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