Born Naked - Hardcover

Mowat, Farley

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0395689279 ISBN 13: 9780395689271

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin, 1994

Synopsis

The author of The Dog Who Wouldn't Be highlights a period of his idyllic youth, revealing the mischievous, inquisitive boy whose fascination with wildlife brought him great joy and his family plenty of tolerant embarrassment.

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Reviews

This spirited memoir of a Canadian childhood by the great nature writer (Never Cry Wolf--not reviewed) is a prequel to My Father's Son and gives the boy's version of the years given a dog's-eye view in The Dog Who Wouldn't Be. Mowat comes from a long line of male misfits. His grandfather was a poet and general failure at whatever he tried, and his father, Angus, was much the same, although he eventually made a living as a novelist-librarian. To most readers, Mowat's childhood will seem a dream, though it's presented with grit and texture. Angus was for a time a beekeeper, and the family lived on oatmeal, soda crackers, and honey until a pestilence killed the bees by the tens of thousands. Angus' trials as a sailor took a toll on his long-suffering wife, Helen, as, year after year, she and Farley (called Bunje) faced storms at sea and holds awash. Bunje acquired an early love for snowshoeing in the woods, iceboating, and fishing. In these pages he fixates on animals, insects, frogs, crayfish, and creepy-crawlies of all shapes and sizes, whom he calls the ``Others,'' and often bathes in the tub with Hercules, his turtle the size of a small dinner plate. He sinks into a great manure pile and loses his pants and shoes. He and pal Geordie snatch funny rubber things from the sewage disposal pipes, fill them with water, and bomb people from his parents' bedroom window. As he turns nine, his idyllic 1920s darken into the '30s as the Depression deepens. Bunje becomes a tireless scribbler of doggerel, much of which he repeats here. Offered a library job in far-off Saskatchewan, Angus builds an ark to hitch onto their coupe and the family sets off on a huge odyssey across Canada to the wildlife- filled prairies that awaken young Mowat to the best days of his life. Born Naked is, like Bunje, wide-eyed and bouncy with the basic joy of being conscious. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Now in his 70s, Mowat ( Never Cry Wolf ) looks back on the happiest years of his life in this delightful memoir of an idyllic boyhood. He has previously described his father, Angus, as the original hippie; his mother, Helen, was more sedate but reluctantly supported her husband's schemes. Growing up in rural Ontario and on the Saskatchewan prairies, Mowat had unlimited freedom to explore the countryside. He gives an entertaining account of the family's boating misadventures, of their move to Saskatoon with a home-built trailer, of a motor trip to Canada's west coast. Entranced by the prairie and its wildlife, Mowat spent most of his time there--often with Mutt, the much loved pet featured in The Dog Who Wouldn't Be. Photos.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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

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
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0395689279
• ISBN 13: 9780395689271
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256