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We also use these cookies to understand how customers use our services (for example, by measuring site visits) so we can make improvements. Sax is wholly successful, however, in transmitting the wonder and admiration with which he regards these iconic birds.We use cookies and similar tools that are necessary to enable you to make purchases, to enhance your shopping experiences and to provide our services, as detailed in our Cookie Notice. The inevitable overlaps in regional and historical views leads to a kind of redundancy rather than the kind of elaboration that might have arisen in a more free-ranging discussion. stop to even consider what the poem might be about.'' The book's organization-by region and epoch-is logical but not necessarily ideal.

Sax can sound moralizing when he generalizes in his discussion of Poe's''The Raven'' he asserts:''Few people. The 95 illustrations (27 in color) are beautifully reproduced: from a Japanese ink drawing of a plump crow bending plum boughs to contemporary photographs of the Yeoman Raven Master feeding his wards at the Tower of London, where they are believed to protect the English Crown. Part of a series that includes odes to dogs, ants, snakes and other cardinal companions and familiar pests, this volume emphasizes that animals and allegory are still fundamental to the human imagination. But Sax's book is more than an endearing act of monomania. Crows have always preoccupied people-as tricksters and crop thieves, as harbingers of death or creators of the world, as models of marital fidelity and bearers of prophecy. In this vivid and enjoyable meditation on crows in art, literature and history, Sax (The Serpent and the Swan: The Animal Bride in Folklore and Literature), a scholar at Mercy College in Dobbs Ferry, New York, gives the genus Corvus the enthusiastic treatment it deserves.

Crow boria sax