Crux

Backvalley Ferrets taught me all about Lenhart, Seligman, environmental issues, and so much more. Lenhart also so beautifully weaves in his journey into fatherhood and how to survive within the Anthropocene. Lenhart is an artist. He has built a beautiful book." -Sean Prentiss, author of Finding Abbey

"Lawrence Lenhart somehow made me care about ferrets. I guess that's the job of great writing: to move the reader's needle on matters that are esoteric or hard or sad or just too weird to believe. It helps that this is a great story he's spinning here-of birth and death and rebirth-both ferret and human-of love and ecology and the people out there saving Ferris, I mean ferrets, and the complicated interplay between ecology, biology, people, and politics in what outsiders refer to as flyover country but what those of us who live in these places just call home. It's hard work keeping anything alive is what I thought a lot, reading this, and it's hard work just being alive and bringing new living things into the world. I can say definitively that this is the most fun you're going to have reading about the art of ferret insemination. Although this excellent book is about ferrets, what it's really about is us." -Ander Monson, author of Vanishing Point: Not a Memoir

"Lawrence Lenhart writes with wit and science smarts about his affection for the black-footed ferret and its place in North American conservation. What makes this book so engaging is the juxtaposition of ferret breeding with human breeding, as the author contemplates having a child in an era when it's clear that he is a member of the super-predator species laying waste to the natural world. His research takes him from a restoration site on the Colorado plateau to the 'frozen zoo,' where genetic material from the orca whale, white rhino, and black-footed ferret lies together sleeping in the cryogenic night. The result is a fascinating and good-hearted book that prods the reader to think anew about conservation in our urban and technologically mediated times." -Alison Hawthorne Deming, author of A Woven World: On Fashion, Fishermen, and the Sardine Dress