Cry of the Panther: Quest of a Species

Rating:
Summary: With a Wilderness Heart
Review: From the heart of the Everglades I coment on my book. It is my sincere hope that everyone on the face of the earth reads this book in all languages. If for no other reason to feel what I felt in relation to helping save an endangered species from extinction.

Rating:
Summary: haunting and important.
Review: I found the story very haunting and important, important because it saved two lives, the cats and Jim Mcmullens. His is more important to me than the Florida cat. I'm sure he has more inside him than the story of the cat. He has family that had to put up with him on his trek into the wilderness and his life in Nam was the breaking point and starting point of the guy I once called "Muck". Really, a gentle person and someone I did not know well enough to call a true friend but well enough to say I knew him and trusted him. His story is real.

Rating:
Summary: cry of the panther
Review: I read this book to my children all under 12 and it was great. We enjoyed the insight to what vietnam was like after studing the vietnam war this past summer. We also loved the feeling of being on the hunt for the panther. For all outdoors men/women this is a must. It is also a must for anyone who really wants to know what living with vietnam is really like.

Rating:
Summary: cry of the panther
Review: I read this book to my children all under 12 and it was great. We enjoyed the insight to what vietnam was like after studing the vietnam war this past summer. We also loved the feeling of being on the hunt for the panther. For all outdoors men/women this is a must. It is also a must for anyone who really wants to know what living with vietnam is really like.

Rating:
Summary: Whose Name Is It, Anyway?
Review: It is no wonder that "Cry of the Panther" by James P. McMullen has been issued in three separate printings since its debut, for it truly is a remarkable book. First pubished in 1984 as a hard cover version by Pineapple Press, it was picked up the next year by McGraw-Hill for the paperback edition, which became a New York Times best seller. Then, in 1996, Pineapple Press reissued "Cry" in soft cover, which developed a whole new following that continues to this day.

Perhaps it also no wonder, then, that this outstanding example of poetical true-story telling, which the late James Dickey called genius, would have its imitators; all great artists must suffer that indignity, it seems, if they live long enough. The incredible thing, though, is that a foreign author has curiously taken McMullen's title for a very different, fictional story that actually cries out for a more appropriate appellation. Indeed, the name "Cry of the Panther" seems to have been dragged in by the hind legs; surely, it's a long reach even for a metaphor here.

Now, while titles themselves cannot be copyrighted, what would motivate an author/publisher to choose an extant title and an ill-fitting one, at that--book sales by association? Just coincidence, some might allow. But is "Books in Print" unavailable in Scotland?

Undoubtedly, author McMullen will take no comfort in the oft-quoted words of Charles Caleb Colton, "Imitation is the sicerest of flattery." For mistaken identity among the book-buying public, especially on the internet, can be harmful to any author. And another hard fact in this computer age of easy access is that we see more and more irresponsible writers "borrowing" other authors' works with impunity, not to mention out-and-out plagiarism. Often, if they are challenged, they merely explain away their behavior with pathetic emanations, like the recent ones we've heard from big-name authors.

So just what is it about good books, then, that prompts some writers to appropriate them or their parts with such indifference? Why, it is the same as for any pirate--easy gold. Gold like the 14-karat threads that weave McMullen's odyssey into a most compelling narrataive of good vs. evil. Gold that shines like a beacon, revealing man's clumsy efforts to manage our planet's resources. Gold like the timeliness and timelessness that bind the pages of "Cry of the Panther" into our hearts and minds. Irresistible stuff, indeed--the kind of thing writers wish they'd said themselves, and which some would like to believe they have, if only by some feeble connection.

This time, fortunately, it's not that easy; McMullen's book is imcomparable. Set in the great but rapidly shrinking expanse of wilderness known as the Florida Everglades, the story unfolds in brillant depictions of the swamps blended with flashbacks from this Vietnam veteran's mind as he sets out, using his U.S. Marine training and experience, to track the disappearing Florida panther. How can this majestic animal not be surviving? he wonders. So begins this man's hopeful quest for traces of a species, the disappearance of which could be a prescient signal of our own demise. And the cry he hears in that wilderness is surely for all of us.

McMullen's book is also about the experience of self-discovery, not only for himself but the reader as well: he takes you with him through the labyrinth of jungle, natural and man-made, over barriers that can hide from us our real purpose for being. If you read James P. McMullen's "Cry of the Panther," you will certainly participate in his epiphany, albeit vicariously. But you can't take it away from him nor make it yours, for it is uniquely his alone. All of it.

--H. D. Rudenshiold