Product Description

This is an account of feral children - those brought up with no human contact, sometimes raised by wild animals, unable to speak or perform many of the functions we consider human. The cases discussed include those of Kamala and Amala, twin girls reputed to have been brought up by wolves in India in the 1920s; Genie, a girl kept in a single room in New York; a boy raised in a hen house in Northern Ireland; and a boy found among wild dogs in Moscow. The book examines their lives and the experiences of those who "rescued" them, looked after them, educated them or abused them.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #26529 in Books
• Published on: 2003-02-17
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 284 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Stories of abandoned children and those children supposedly raised by animals have long fascinated us, as the legend of Romulus and Remus makes clear. More recent stories also capture the imagination. The Wild Boy of Aveyron, caught running naked in woods in provincial France in 1800, has been the subject of biography and fiction and the attempt by the physician Jean Itard to educate the boy formed the basis for a memorable film by Truffaut. The appearance of Kaspar Hauser in the streets of early 19th-century Nuremberg, after a mysterious 16-year imprisonment in a dark and tiny cellar, evoked fantastic tales of a lost prince and rightful heir cruelly shut away. He too was the subject of a film--a visionary and visually inventive masterpiece by the German director Werner Herzog. Michael Newton's Savage Girls and Wild Boys: a History of Feral Children tells these stories and many more like them--wolf-children in 1920s India, a Russian boy living on the streets of Moscow and scavenging with a pack of wild dogs, a boy brought up by monkeys in Uganda. Much more than just a frisson-inducing account of the weird and the bizarre, Savage Girls and Wild Boys is an ambitious exploration of what these stories (and our fascination with them) tell us about the shifting boundary between nature and civilisation.--Nick Rennison

Review
'The stories Newton has to tell are spellbinding.' Mail on Sunday 'A collection of six, extraordinary individual histories, beautifully navigated.' Evening Standard

The subject of feral children has fascinated us for centuries: Michael Newtons intriguing study is the definitive take on the subject, and (along with its remarkable case histories) throws up some challenging questions. What is the basis of human nature and how much is it the product of conditioning and training? What are the key factors in the creation of the human personality? And how important is language as a civilizing force? The last question is a particularly pertinent one, as all the wild children described in Newtons book are (initially) silent, with their progress to being 'humanised' marked by the acquisition of rudimentary speech. We have all been mesmerized by the films dealing with the Enfant Savage: Fran?ois Truffauts film of that name, for instance, and such fictional treatments as Kiplings The Jungle Book and Edgar Rice Burroughs Tarzan. But its the real thing that concerns Newton, from Peter the Wild Boy (who so fascinated Jonathan Swift and Daniel Defoe), Memmie le Blanc, the Savage Girl of Champagne found in the woods in France in the 1720s, Kaspar Hauser (also given film treatment) who appeared in Nuremberg in 1828, and the famous Wolf Girls of India to the more recent case of a boy raised by monkeys. All are treated intelligently, with several dubious cases summarily dismissed. Newton excels at putting the various wild children in the correct historical perspective, examining both the emotional and philosophical reactions to the phenomena. Always involving and astonishing, this is a book that makes us question our most fondly held ideas about education and the nature of what it is to be 'civilized'. (Kirkus UK)

British professor Newton vents a ten-year obsession, stemming from his Ph.D. dissertation, by examining six celebrated cases of so-called feral children. Romulus and Remus, legendary founders of Rome, are seen by the author as emblematic of the mythic mystery surrounding stories of infants supposedly nurtured in the wild by animals. But not all feral children were raised by wolves: the lost and abandoned, those stuffed into closets, pigsties, or henhouses for years on end by abusive or psychotic "guardians" all initially present society with the same tragic and, it seems, irresistibly exploitable circumstances. In some of the cases Newton delves into, the discovered child could not speak and never fully acquired language; in others, the facility remained from earlier childhood and almost inevitably led to charges of fraud and duplicity that, in the end, transmuted one kind of suffering into another. All of these stories (and others mentioned in passing) are intrinsically fascinating, but the author leans toward intellectual meandering that can take the edge off his revelations. In the case of Peter, the 18th-century "wild boy" brought to England from Germany, for example, Newton's speculations on the involvement of writers Jonathan Swift and Daniel Defoe and their reflections on the matter consume entire pages. He touches a nerve, however, in summing up the stark fact that in almost all of these instances, spanning several centuries to the present day, no one could be found who would simply care for the lost child without serving some vested interest. Thankfully, that we get a seemingly happy ending for contemporary wild child Ivan Mishukov, whose story appears in the beginning. The four-year-old Muscovite, who took to the streets in 1996 with a pack of dogs that actually kept the cops at bay while he stole food from restaurant kitchens and eventually "promoted" him to pack leader, is now back in school and progressing normally. Fascinating tales, analyzed at times to excess. (Kirkus Reviews)

Mail on Sunday, 3 February 2002
the stories Newton has to tell are spellbinding.

Customer Reviews

A wonderful book about abandonment and survival
This is a beautifully written, moving account of 'feral' children - children who have, for one reason or another, been left to fend for themselves in the wild. Many of them, like modern-day Romuluses and Remuses, were discovered and cared for by animals. What is so good about the book is that the author does not simply tell these often terrible stories, but ponders the meanings that they hold for us now. Just as for the enlightenment philosophers of the 18th century, wild children offered a challenge to received ideas of civilisation, for Michael Newton, these stories of innocence lost and found offer rich insights into what it means to be human. This is a book that has to be read.

I thought this book was incredibly moving and interesting.
I didn't know what to expect from this book, but soon found myself absolutely gripped by each of the stories. They often work with the fluency of fiction, while obviously being based on well-researched documentary accounts.
This is a book that stays with you - that even subtly changes how you think about the world.
This book isn't a potboiler, or a psychiatric treatise - it's a powerfull account of what we feel about childhood, solitude, savagery, passion and our connection to nature.

Some fascinating and moving accounts
I bought this book because of a long-standing interest in the Kaspar Hauser case. Not only did I learn much that was new about Hauser but I was able to set his case in the context of a long history of 'feral' children before and since. Newton's book manages to avoid sensationalising his subject-matter, but his objectivity and breadth of contextualisation provide the reader with more than enough material to bring these stories alive. All this would be worthy enough, but what lifts the entire volume is the last case, that of Genie, kept in appalling conditions in a suburb of Los Angeles by her own overbearing father. Her life had been awful enough, but her subsequent treatment by self-seeking carers and an unfeeling bureaucracy shows how our attitudes to the rescue and re-education of these misfit kids have scarcely changed over the centuries. I finished this book better-informed about the subject and about humanity as a whole.