Book Review: The Art of Being a Wolf by Anne Ménatory

Yet another non-fiction wolf book!

The Art of Being a Wolf explores various aspects of the life of wolves. Their hunting tactics, social lives, reproduction and how they look after their pups, etc. There's also a significant section dedicated to the history of wolves and how they have been hunted to extinction in large portions of Europe.

Overall this book is pretty decent...but there's some stuff holding it back. But first: the good.

The first thing that caught my eye about this book (aside from the fact that it's huge) is how many beautiful photos can be found inside. Photos of high quality can be found throughout, with descriptions. Which is great if you like the visuals or maybe even use them as potential reference material for drawings like me. They're all beautiful and I'm glad that there were many photographs included on the pages in between each chapter. Also, the writing style was very accessible and no doubt teaches some people about wolves. 

As for the negatives: there is a bunch of incorrect or outdated information about this book. Incorrect information includes stuff such as using the dated way of pack structures (alpha-beta-omega) which had already been debunked when this book was released and things like saying that female wolf pups have different coat colors from the males. Like, wolves are very slightly sexually dimorphic, with males being bigger and bulkier and the females smaller and more lithely built, but this is ridiculous.

And of course, with this book being published in 2005, there's a lot of other outdated stuff, such as the ranges of wolves in Europe. For example, back when this was written the idea of wolves returning to the Netherlands and Belgium was rather improbable, but around 2018 the first wolves did return here. 

If you don't mind the incorrect information, can distinguish between what is true and false, or simply want the book for the photos, I guess I could carefully recommend it? But if you genuinely want to use it as a learning tool I'd recommend you skip this one.

Rating: 2.5/5