Heart of a Lion, William Stolzenburg
Heart of a Lion, William Stolzenburg
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Heart of a Lion
A Lone Cat's Walk Across America

Author: William Stolzenburg

Narrator: Mike DelGaudio

Unabridged: 7 hr 42 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 04/12/2016

Categories: Nonfiction, Nature, Animals

Synopsis

Late one June night in 2011, a large animal collided with an SUV cruising down a Connecticut parkway. The creature appeared as something out of New England’s forgotten past. Beside the road lay a 140-pound mountain lion.Speculations ran wild, the wildest of which figured him a ghostly survivor from a bygone century when lions last roamed the eastern United States. But a more fantastic scenario of facts soon unfolded. The lion was three years old, with a DNA trail embarking from the Black Hills of South Dakota on a cross-country odyssey eventually passing within thirty miles of New York City. It was the farthest landbound trek ever recorded for a wild animal in America, by a barely weaned teenager venturing solo through hostile terrain.William Stolzenburg retraces his two-year journey—from his embattled birthplace in the Black Hills, across the Great Plains and the Mississippi River, through Midwest metropolises and remote northern forests, to his tragic finale upon Connecticut’s Gold Coast. Along the way, the lion traverses lands with people gunning for his kind, as well as those championing his cause.Heart of a Lion is a story of one heroic creature pitting instinct against towering odds, coming home to a society deeply divided over his return. It is a testament to the resilience of nature, and a test of humanity’s willingness to live again beside the ultimate symbol of wildness.

About William Stolzenburg

William Stolzenburg has written hundreds of magazine articles about the science and spirit of saving wild creatures. A 2010 Alicia Patterson Journalism Fellow, he is the author of the books Where the Wild Things Were and Rat Island. He is also the screenwriter of the documentaries Lords of Nature: Life in a Land of Great Predators and Ocean Frontiers: The Dawn of a New Era in Ocean Stewardship. He lives in Reno, Nevada.

Reviews

Goodreads review by L.G. on September 29, 2020

There are significant insights in this book, if your mind is open enough to recognize them. This is superbly written, journalistic style non-fiction, rendering a mountain lion's journey from the Black Hills of South Dakota to the Connecticut coast, but that's only the glue that holds this exceptional......more

Goodreads review by Janny on August 14, 2016

This is a gorgeously written, factually tracked account of a male mountain lion's journey from the Black Hills to the coast of Connecticut - based in accurate science, with parallel accounts of other cats' journeys in their attempts to disperse and re-colonize their former range. It traces human att......more

Goodreads review by Skip on August 30, 2018

Truth is stranger than fiction. Here's the basics slightly edited: Late one June night in 2011, a large animal collides with an SUV cruising down Connecticut's scenic Merritt Parkway. The creature appears as something out of New England's forgotten past. Beside the road lay a 140-pound mountain lion......more

Goodreads review by Amy on April 22, 2022

I stumbled across Heart of Lion due to an amazon promotion, and almost didn't get it. I thought it was going to be a nonrepresentative book about a single animal, that it wouldn't have good information, and that might be boring. It was the glowing reviews that convinced me to give it a shot, which I......more

Goodreads review by Mark on May 03, 2019

On a summer night in 2011, on a highway in Connecticut, a mountain lion was struck and killed. Once DNA testing was done on the wayward animal, it was discovered, that it came from the Black Hills of South Dakota. This excellent book traces the extraordinary path of this lion, along with the history......more

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