Jack Olsen’s Night of the Grizzlies is exactly the kind of book that reminds you why narrative nonfiction became so popular. It moves with the pace of an action film, making it nearly impossible to put down while recounting the tragic 1967 grizzly attacks in Glacier National Park.
My initial reaction was mixed. The storytelling often feels highly dramatized, occasionally blurring the line between journalism and thriller. With fifty-seven years of hindsight and advances in wildlife biology, some of the rhetoric and reconstructed scenes can feel overly sensationalized, and the book sometimes frames bears as cinematic antagonists more than products of a flawed management system.
But then I remembered when it was written: 1969, less than two years after the attacks.
That context changed my assessment considerably. Olsen correctly identified many of the underlying causes long before they became pillars of modern wildlife management. He recognized that habituation to human food, poor garbage practices, and increasing recreation in bear habitat were driving conflict. Rather than simply calling for more bears to be killed, he argued that human behavior had fundamentally altered bear behavior. Those insights have aged remarkably well.
The final chapters shift from reporting into environmental philosophy, and while they occasionally overreach scientifically, they also capture the emerging conservation ethic of the late 1960s. Read today, the book is both a gripping historical document and a snapshot of a pivotal moment in our understanding of how humans and large predators can coexist.
It may not satisfy readers looking for detached academic history, but judged on its own terms, it remains an extraordinarily compelling work of narrative nonfiction. More surprisingly, many of its central ecological insights have stood the test of time far better than I expected.
★★★★½