Born Naked: The Early Adventures of the Author of Never Cry Wolf

by Farley Mowat

Overview

Farley Mowat's youth was charmed and hilarious, and unbelievably free in its access to unspoiled nature through bird-banding expeditions and overnight outings in the dead of winter. The author writes of sleeping in haystacks for survival, and other adventures, with equal shares of Booth Tarkington and Jack London. He also brings back Mutt, the famous hero-dog of his classic THE DOG WHO WOULDN'T BE, and his pet owl Wol, hero of OWLS IN THE FAMILY. The tale of an outrageous and clever boy, BORN NAKED takes its place as the foundation of the Farley Mowat canon.

Customer Reviews

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780547347103
Publisher:	Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Publication date:	03/22/1995
Sold by:	Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
Sales rank:	309,376
File size:	6 MB

About the Author

FARLEY MOWAT's many books, including NEVER CRY WOLF, SEA OF SLAUGHTER, and BORN NAKED, have delighted young and old alike. They have sold over fourteen million copies worldwide and have been published in fifty-two languages. He lives in Port Hope, Ontario, with his wife, the writer, Claire Mowat.

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