Michael Engelhard – författare

Prime Arctic predator and nomad of the sea ice and tundra, the polar bear endures as a source of wonder, terror, and fascination. Humans have seen it as spirit guide and fanged enemy, as trade good and moral metaphor, as food source and symbol of ecological crisis. Eight thousand years of artifacts attest to its charisma, and to the fraught relationships between our two species. In the White Bear, we acknowledge the magic of wildness: it is both genuinely itself and a screen for our imagination.Ice Bear traces and illuminates this intertwined history. From Inuit shamans to Jean Harlow lounging on a bearskin rug, from the cubs trained to pull sleds toward the North Pole to cuddly superstar Knut, it all comes to life in these pages. With meticulous research and more than 160 illustrations, the author brings into focus this powerful and elusive animal. Doing so, he delves into the stories we tell about Nature—and about ourselves—hoping for a future in which such tales still matter.

Inspired by a year of hiking 120 desert canyons, Where the Rain Children Sleep is nature writing in the best tradition of Edward Abbey, Ellen Meloy, and Craig Childs. Much more than one man's memoir of his time in these canyons, it is an eclectic, well-informed, critical, and in-depth collection punctuated by flashes of humor and whimsy. The vivid thread connecting these essays is the Navajo concept of a "sacred geography."  Michael Engelhard has traveled and explored the Southwest for close to twenty years. His heartfelt portrayal of this region straddles the fences normally separating natural history, ethnography, personal reflection, and travel narrative. These essays spring from a growing concern that the song of the land, the stories of these places, and the voices of their nonhuman and indigenous inhabitants might not be heard against the din of bulldozers, powerboats, turbines, and four-wheelers.