The last time Cam went to Montana, he picked up a book for me: Decade of the Wolf: Returning the Wild to Yellowstone by Douglas W. Smith and Gary Ferguson. As someone who likes wolves, I was looking forward to this book, and really enjoyed my reading of it. More details after the jump.

The first thing that I had to adjust to when reading this book, was the writing style. I’m used to reading basically two types of books: fiction, and text-books. For me, fiction is predictable in that it has a linear (usually) and continuous (usually) storyline that can be read cover-to-cover. When I’m reading text-books, however, I usually find the first chapter that has new and interesting information and start there; where I might skip around as needed. Decade of the Wolf was something different altogether – each chapter was organized around a single point of view, and discussed the entire wolf reintroduction project from that point of view. In some cases, this would cover the entire ten year project, and it others, only some portion of it. So, in reading it cover-to-cover, I read about the same events sometimes four or five times over the course of the book.

While this didn’t distract from the information or the storytelling per se, it made it very easy to put down between readings. There was no point when I was reading Decade of the Wolf that I couldn’t put it down in the middle of a page. What I found, though, was that as I progressed, this made the book more readable – with each point of view added to the discussion, a bigger picture emerged. With something as big as the Yellowstone ecosystem, this way of creating the bigger picture really worked for me. This makes me wonder how re-readable the book is as a whole; namely, once the big picture is in place, how do the early chapters stack up?

The other thing that got to me early on was the distinct lack of detail. There seemed many points in the book where a little detail would go a long way of really bringing life to the subject. However, those were specifically the times when detail was lacking. It made me really realize that in these cases the authors were dealing with observations of wild animals – there really weren’t any known details! While this was frustrating for me as a reader, I walked away with a little more appreciation for the difficulty inherent in writing a book like this, and appreciated the details that they did have that much more.

Overall, I have to say that Decade of the Wolf was a great read, even if it wasn’t mind-changing or life-altering. It also fit well into the time I have allotted for reading – each chapter easily fit into the 40 minute bus ride to or from campus every day. I would definitely suggest it to anyone looking for a good peek at wolves in the wild, just so long as you realize, it’s just a peek…