Quick Take
- Narration: Sy Montgomery reads her own essays alongside Elizabeth Marshall Thomas’s work; the personal delivery adds warmth and authenticity to the whole collection.
- Themes: Animal cognition, the shrinking boundary between human and animal capability, compassionate observation of other species
- Mood: Gentle and curious, occasionally startling when harsher realities intrude into the wonder
- Verdict: An ideal companion for animal lovers who want short, intelligent essays they can return to repeatedly.
There is a particular kind of listening that short essay collections invite: not sustained immersion but a kind of dipping in and out, returning to a voice the way you might return to a trusted friend’s letters. I found Tamed and Untamed best suited to Sunday mornings, one or two essays at a time, with enough quiet afterward to let each piece land before moving to the next. Sy Montgomery narrating her own writing, and Thomas’s writing alongside it, gives the collection an intimacy that a professional narrator reading the same text would not have delivered.
The premise is disarmingly simple. Two of the most respected animal writers in the country, best friends as well as colleagues, each wrote short columns for the Boston Globe about their encounters with and thoughts on the animal world. Collected here, they alternate between authors, which means you are getting two distinct sensibilities in conversation across eighty-plus brief pieces. Montgomery and Elizabeth Marshall Thomas do not always agree, and the places where their perspectives diverge are often the most interesting moments in the audio.
Our Take on Tamed and Untamed
Montgomery’s framing observation, quoted in the synopsis, is the intellectual core of the book: the list of attributes once thought to be uniquely human, including tool use, warfare, mourning, and play, is not only rapidly shrinking but starting to look less impressive as a measure of human specialness the more honestly we compare ourselves with other species. The essays pursue that idea in directions ranging from snail cognition to great white shark behavior to the specific ways domestic cats navigate their relationships with humans. Each essay runs around three pages, which in audio terms is roughly five to seven minutes. The brevity forces precision. Neither author wastes sentences.
Thomas brings a slightly more unsentimental edge to some of her pieces, particularly those about predator-prey dynamics and the violence that underlies ecosystems we prefer to think of as peaceful. Montgomery’s compassion is more openly felt: her essays on octopuses and on dogs she has known carry a quality of genuine grief for the brevity of animal lives that cuts through the short format. Several reviewers mentioned the harsher realities the book does not shy away from, and those moments give the collection depth beyond the purely charming.
Why This Narration Format Works
Having Montgomery read both her own essays and Thomas’s is an unusual choice, but it functions. The essays alternate between the two authors and Montgomery’s voice creates a thread of continuity across the shifts in sensibility. She does not attempt to differentiate the two voices dramatically, which would have felt false. Instead she reads both with the same engaged care, and the listener comes to understand whose observations they are from context and tone rather than performance. Given that Montgomery and Thomas are described throughout as best friends, the single-voice approach actually mirrors something true about their creative relationship and how thoroughly their perspectives have informed each other over decades of shared work.
What to Watch For in the Essay Selection
Because the essays were originally columns rather than chapters of a unified book, there is no throughline argument being built toward a conclusion. Listeners expecting the collection to resolve into a final statement will find the experience slightly unsatisfying if approached that way. The pleasure is associative and cumulative: an essay about house cats tells you something that sharpens the next essay about lions, and both resonate differently after a piece about the history of domestication and wildness. The collection rewards returning to pieces you have already heard; context accretes across the nearly six hours in ways that a single listen will not fully unlock.
Who Should Add This to Their Queue
This is a natural fit for readers who already follow Montgomery or Thomas in print, but it also works well for listeners new to serious animal writing who want an entry point that is accessible rather than academic. The short essay format makes it excellent for commutes or household tasks where sustained attention is difficult to maintain. Those looking for a single sustained argument about animal cognition or conservation should look elsewhere; this is observation and wonder rather than thesis-driven nonfiction. For what it is, though, it is among the more satisfying listening experiences in the nature writing category, and the combination of two writers who have devoted their lives to this subject gives even the brief pieces more weight than the format might suggest.
What Montgomery and Thomas share, beyond friendship and decades of parallel work, is a fundamental conviction that paying close attention to other animals is not a sentimental indulgence but an act of intellectual seriousness. The essays bear that conviction out in their precision: neither author mistakes warmth for rigor, and neither sacrifices rigor for warmth. That combination, and the fact that it arrives in short, returnable units across six hours, makes this one of the more genuinely useful collections in the nature writing space for listeners who want to change how they look at the world around them without committing to a sustained academic argument. The pleasure is distributed rather than concentrated, which is exactly what the essay format at its best can do.
If there is a complaint to make about the audio format for this particular collection, it is that the short essay form, which worked as an occasional Boston Globe column, can feel slightly repetitive across six uninterrupted hours. The individual essays are excellent; the question is whether listening to eighty of them consecutively serves the material as well as reading them in the original scattered-over-time format did. My answer is that the audio rewards a dipping-in approach rather than a linear listen, and Audible’s chapter navigation makes it easy to choose two or three essays at a sitting rather than committing to the full run. That is not a criticism of the production so much as a practical observation about how to use it well.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need to have read Sy Montgomery’s or Elizabeth Marshall Thomas’s other books to appreciate this collection?
No prior familiarity is required. Each essay is self-contained, and both authors write for a general reader rather than assuming expertise. If anything, this collection works well as an introduction to both writers’ sensibilities before committing to longer works like Montgomery’s The Soul of an Octopus or Thomas’s The Hidden Life of Dogs.
Is the narration by Sy Montgomery alone, or does Elizabeth Marshall Thomas also read her own essays?
Montgomery reads the entire audio, including Thomas’s essays. Thomas is not present as a narrator. The choice maintains coherence across the collection and suits the collaborative, conversational spirit of the project, since the essays were co-written as an ongoing dialogue between the two friends.
The essays were originally Boston Globe columns. Does the collection feel disjointed as a result?
There is no argument being built toward a conclusion, which some listeners will find frustrating. The pleasure is in the individual pieces and the resonance between them rather than in narrative or logical structure. Reviewers who approached it as a collection to dip in and out of reported more satisfaction than those who listened straight through expecting a unified arc.
Are the harsher essays about predation and animal death a significant portion of the collection?
They are present but not dominant. The collection leans toward wonder and curiosity more than toward the difficult realities of the natural world. When harder moments appear, they provide necessary ballast against the risk of sentimentality without making the overall experience feel dark. The balance between the two authors partly accounts for this: Montgomery tends toward emotional warmth while Thomas brings more analytical unsentimental observation.
