The Wake of Crows: Living and Dying in Shared Worlds

A necessary and beautiful book, The Wake of Crows models the work of living responsibly inside both the humanities and the sciences in order to nurture still-possible worlds. This book shows us what collaborative efforts to enact multispecies communities mean, and might yet mean, in the context of ongoing processes of extinction and extermination. Moving through diverse sites of human/crow encounter, it offers insights into the fragile, situated, ongoing work necessary to cultivating ecologies of hope in troubled times. -- Donna Haraway, author of Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene The Wake of Crows is a thoughtful and captivating book that opens our imagination. Thom van Dooren shows us that accepting the challenge to coexist with crows without dreaming that they will come to behave as a loyal and grateful companion species might teach us priceless lessons at a time when we need to learn how to make room for many different, sometimes inconvenient, but so very interesting others. -- Isabelle Stengers, author of In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism Writing from a personal and scholarly perspective, Thom van Dooren takes us on a deep dive into the human-crow relationship that both informs natural history and lays bare the importance of expanding our own ethics to value all of life and our wonderful connections to it. -- John M. Marzluff, author of Gifts of the Crow and Welcome to Subirdia The Wake of Crows demonstrates yet another way that the humanities are integral to resisting species loss and plotting practices of living well together...holding open more inclusive ways of being at the edge of extinction requires the brave and urgent scholarship that animates [this book]. -- Nathaniel Otjen, University of Oregon * ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment *