"[A] fascinating, incisive work of moral imagination." --Susan Sontag "When Ms. Hearne relates a dog or horse story, the animals become full-fledged characters, as brightly delineated as people created by Dickens or Twain. [Her] passion for her subject, along with her eclectic intelligence and technical expertise, succeeds in making even the most skeptical reader re-evaluate his relationship with animals and his preconceptions about communication. Adam's Task stands as a most intriguing and original book." --Michiko Kakutani, New York Times "There is no finer book than this one about the way language entwines humans and animals." -- Audubon Magazine "A beautiful, wonderful book . that permanently refreshes thought and feeling.

" -- Boston Globe "As witty, wise and rare a book as has come along in some time." -- San Francisco Chronicle "This wonderful book will become essential to anyone who chooses to live with a horse, dog, or cat." --David Leavitt "A fascinating and often surprising discussion of animal-human encounters." -- Atlantic Monthly "This engrossing treatise on animal behavior and interspecies communication provides an astute and possibly unique synthesis of a domestic animal trainer's practical knowledge and the intellectually more distant and even sterile theories of the academic world." -- Library Journal "Through luminous anecdotes, she . develops rigorous and beautiful descriptions of the transactions between animals and people, what they entail, and what the expectations--on both sides--are." -- Publishers Weekly.