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WHEELING - The Ohio County Public Library’s next Lunch With Books program will feature author Andrew Moore, who will discuss his new book, "The Beasts of the East: The Fall and Rise of America’s Eastern Wilderness."
The program will take place at noon on Tuesday, Sept. 29, at the library in downtown Wheeling.
The book is a celebration of the extraordinary lost natural wonder of the eastern U.S. - an astonishingly abundant landscape that was once the center of American wildness before its despoliation - and a revelatory journey through recent efforts to return elk, bison, wolves and other creatures to their native landscapes.
Moore is the author of "Pawpaw: In Search of America's Forgotten Fruit," which was a James Beard Foundation Award nominee in writing and literature. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and The Daily Yonder. He lives in Pittsburgh.
The new book is about reintroducing elk to reclaimed strip mines in East Kentucky, incorporating "wild" bison onto fenced prairie preserves in Illinois and Indiana, and the recovery of the endangered red wolf in northeast North Carolina.
"I began working on this project way back in 2016, when I reported on the reintroduction of elk to southern West Virginia for The Daily Yonder," he said. "The West Virginia elk reintroduction is centered around Logan County."
The book has further relevance to the local Wheeling community, as the Oglebay Good Zoo is part of the SAFE (Saving Animals From Extinction) Red Wolf program, Moore noted.
"The main purposes of this program are to ensure that the species does not go extinct and to breed the animals in captivity for release into the wild," he said. "Currently, this only takes place in northeast North Carolina - which means that one of the world’s rarest mammals, the American red wolf (Canis rufus), is right there in Wheeling."