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Avg. Rating: 4.5
An incredibly gripping Jurassic drama
I wouldn't have thought what Robert Bakker has done in this book was possible! Certainly his academic work grabbed the public imagination, and his factual book "The Dinosaur Heresies" stirred up controversy with his theory that dinosaurs were actually fast, warm-blooded animals quite like modern mammals and birds. But to write a full-length novel about the day-to-day life of a dinosaur? How interesting could that be?
Well, maybe it's me - when I was a boy I used to devour the "animal books" of Jack London and Ernest Seton Thompson - but I just couldn't put "Raptor Red" down. You hear that said a lot, but this time it was literally true. Told in the present tense throughout, this story simply rips along, going from one thrilling episode to another and astonishing you with little-known but exciting facts and informed speculation.
By the way, the heroine (you have to call her that) turns out to be almost identical to the "velociraptors" in the film "Jurassic Park". At the time, everyone thought Steven Spielberg had contradicted all the scientific evidence by making his raptors twice as big as human beings - then in 1982, the year before the film was released, someone dug up fossils from a raptor that was almost identical to Spielberg's. That animal - christened Utahraptor - is Raptor Red, and she tangles with some scary opposition along the way. You wouldn't think there would be much that could threaten a fast-moving 500-pound monster with razor-sharp claws and teeth... until page 16, anyway.
Bakker is a born writer, and not only does he keep the action humming along, he even finds time for a lot more character development than you will find in many novels about people. Within a few pages you will find yourself identifying with Raptor Red, urging her on as she stalks prey, holding your breath when she is in danger, even sighing when she finds a mate. Then you pinch yourself and remember that she'd have YOU for dinner in about half of no time at all.
The key lies in Bakker's belief that some dinosaurs - certainly utahraptors - were highly intelligent, perhaps as much so as wolves and bears, or even the great apes. That opens up a whole new dimension that most renderings of the prehistoric world have utterly lacked.
Although it's a compact and inexpensive paperback, "Raptor Red" has been carefully produced, with considerable attention to detail. Starting with the holographic portrait of Raptor Red herself on the cover - it's corny, but I liked it. Every one of the 26 chapters begins with a little thumbnail drawing of a type of dinosaur mentioned in the story. And Bakker has written an interesting and instructive preface and epilogue, to explain some facts he couldn't reasonably fit into the book itself.
If you are in the least interested in dinosaurs, or animals of any kind - read it! You can't go wrong.
Storys
The book, Raptor Red, was a thrilling tale on life during the Jurassic era. With the story being told through a raptor, you believe you become one. Robert Bakker made this book inspire creative writers to write the most unimagined story ever.
One of those "changes my life" books
I LOVE THIS BOOK. I'm not a scientist of any sort--I'm a linguist and lay pastor. But this book took me into a realm I had never been. I read it on the beach--got totally sunburnt because I couldn't put the book down and go in the house. I'm sure Bakker had no idea a 40-something divorced Mom/college prof was going to relate to his book in this manner, but, .... here's what I took away from it.
It explained to me the 'prime directive' of biological life--to pass on our DNA. No matter what we're doing throughout our lives, we are driven by the same urge--to attract a worthy mate who will engender healthy offspring and help us raise those offspring to continue to pass on our DNA. Even though Red is completely unaware of this directive, it guides every choice she makes, from the moment she wakes in the morning til she falls asleep at night. Having lost her own chick, she risks her life time and again to help rear her sister's chick, and see the chick safely grown, mated and producing viable offspring. Other chicks of her same breed are interesting--important too--but do not arouse in her the protective urge that her sister's chick does. They don't carry any thing NEAR the close DNA match that her sister's chick does--why waste time and resources on them, unless her sister's chick is safe? This explains why I adore my brother's chicks, I mean kids, but I'm not real crazy about my nephew-in-law. He's got NONE of my DNA--and he has my brother-in-law's snout.
From Red I learned several things about relationships that I believe are based upon how deeply the Prime Directive is encoded into our biology, and I think that realizing how engrained these behaviors are in our psyche can help us make better choices: to acknowledge the Directive and act according to it, or to lay it aside on occasion for another (higher?) purpose. Some of these lessons are:
1) Attempt to make yourself appear healthy--acknowledge what the 'healthy' signals are to your species (and culture) and do what you can within reasonable bounds to accomodate those, so that you can attract the largest number of mates possible from which to choose the best mate for yourself. Red spent hours trying to smoothe over scars on her thighs for fear the male raptors would think she had "fallen" during hunting.
2) Choose a mate that is not only healthy (refer to species-specific and culturally determined codes for assessing health), but also exhibits character traits that assure him to be capable of a) engendering healthy offspring; b) hunting successfully with me (since raptors and humans hunt in pairs); c) protecting said offspring until they are old enough to pass on their (our) DNA themselves.
3)Give him a good sniff at first meeting to make sure that he smells enough like your littermates to be LIKE you, but enough DIFFERENT from your littermates that he's not.... ewww... one of them.
4) If a potential mate comes to do his Dance of Love and his nodding and bobbing just don't appeal to you... don't feel guilty about it. Move on. There's something amiss there. Soon there will be some suitor whose moves will thrill you right down to your tarsal claws, I mean toenails.
5) Pay close attention to female relationships. They can provide very valuable assistance when your chicks need a hand across a raging, flooded stream, while you are stranded downstream.
6) Once your chicks are able to find their own mates, and they're off making their OWN chicks... you have complied with the Prime Directive!! You are HOME FREE!! and now sex is for FUN! Find that mate and party hardy!
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