Criticism
In a 1964 article published in the Canadian Field-Naturalist, Canadian Wildlife Federation official Frank Banfield compared Mowat's 1963 bestseller to Little Red Riding Hood, stating, "I hope that readers of "Never Cry Wolf" will realize that both stories have about the same factual content." L. David Mech, a wolf expert, stated that Mowat is no scientist and that in all his studies, he had never encountered a wolf pack which primarily subsisted on small prey as shown in Mowat's book.
Duncan Pryde, a Hudsons Bay Company trader who pioneered the linguistic study of Inuit languages, attacked Mowat's claim to have picked up the language quickly enough in two months to discuss detailed concepts such as shamanism, pointing out that the language is complex and required a year or more for Europeans to master the basics. Pryde said that when Mowat visited his post at Baker Lake in 1958 he only spoke a single word in the Inuit language.
Read more about this topic: Farley Mowat
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)
“To be just, that is to say, to justify its existence, criticism should be partial, passionate and political, that is to say, written from an exclusive point of view, but a point of view that opens up the widest horizons.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)
“I, with other Americans, have perhaps unduly resented the stream of criticism of American life ... more particularly have I resented the sneers at Main Street. For I have known that in the cottages that lay behind the street rested the strength of our national character.”
—Herbert Hoover (1874–1964)