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Summary
Summary
For millennia, lions, tigers, and their man-eating kin have kept our dark, scary forests dark and scary, and their predatory majesty has been the stuff of folklore. But by the year 2150 big predators may only exist on the other side of glass barriers and chain-link fences. Their gradual disappearance is changing the very nature of our existence. We no longer occupy an intermediate position on the food chain; instead we survey it invulnerably from above--so far above that we are in danger of forgetting that we even belong to an ecosystem.
Casting his expert eye over the rapidly diminishing areas of wilderness where predators still reign, the award-winning author of The Song of the Dodo examines the fate of lions in India's Gir forest, of saltwater crocodiles in northern Australia, of brown bears in the mountains of Romania, and of Siberian tigers in the Russian Far East. In the poignant and troublesome ferocity of these embattled creatures, we recognize something primeval deep within us, something in danger of vanishing forever.
Author Notes
Writer David Quammen grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio and was later educated at both Yale and Oxford Universities.
Quammen began his career by writing for The Christian Science Monitor, the National Center for Appropriate Technology, and Audubon, Esquire, Rolling Stone, and Harpers Magazines. He wrote the novels The Soul of Viktor Tronko and The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions, which won the 1997 New York Public Library Helen Bernstein Award for Excellence in Journalism. He also received two National Magazine Awards for his column "Natural Acts" in Outside magazine.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
With equal parts lucid travel narrative and scholarly rumination, Quammen (The Song of the Dodo) describes the fascinating past, tenuous present and bleak future of four supremely adapted predators who are finding themselves increasingly out of place in the modern world. The animals-Indian lions, Australian crocodiles, Russian brown bears and Siberian tigers-share more in common than alpha roles in their respective environments and dwindling prospects for maintaining them; they are, as the book pointedly notes, man-eaters, animals that can and do feed on human flesh. Quammen admits that the term may seem antiquated, but, he writes, "there's just no precise and gender-neutral alternative that says the same thing with the same degree of terse, atavistic punch." He looks at the animals both up close and from an intellectual distance, examining them in their threatened enclaves in the wild and pondering what these killers have meant to us in our religion and art from the pages of the Bible and Beowulf to Norse sagas and African poetry. His writing is sharp and vital, whether depicting his guide's chance childhood encounter with a lion cub or the heat of a rollicking crocodile hunt in a soupy river. Equally resonant are his arguments for why these particular animals excite such fear and fascination in us, and how we will suffer in terms practical and profound if they are eliminated completely from their habitats and confined to zoos and human memory. The crisp reportorial immediacy and sobering analysis make for a book that is as powerful and frightening as the animals it chronicles. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
One man's monster is another man's God, observes renowned science writer Quammen in this fresh and many-faceted inquiry into the complex and crucial relationship between humankind and alpha predators; that is, the lions, tigers, crocodiles, and bears that occasionally eat human beings, reminding us that we, like all animals, are meat. Learning to live with man-eaters, to both fear and revere them, has been an intrinsic element in our psychological, mythic, and spiritual evolution, and Quammen incisively analyzes tales of our species' encounters with the monstrous from Gilgamesh to the Bible's leviathan to the Alien movies. Eloquent and engaging whether he's parsing ecological science or considering metaphysical and social conundrums, Quammen vividly chronicles his sobering journeys within the rapidly shrinking realms of today's endangered alpha predators, including India's Kathiawar Peninsula, home of the Asiatic lion; Australia's Northern Territory, where the mighty crocodile rules; Romania's bear country; and the Russian Far East, land of the Amu, or Siberian tiger. Quammen's riveting study of the primordial connection between man and beast leads inexorably to visions of a future bereft of these magnificent creatures, a dire ecological and psychic loss that, if our species survives, will itself become a source of myth. --Donna Seaman Copyright 2003 Booklist
Choice Review
The chapter titles of Monster of God offer little indication of their content. Homo sapiens evolved in a landscape dominated by fearsome predators. Quammen focuses on the great cats (lion, tiger, leopard), bears, crocodiles, and sharks. He ignores the wolf, which figures so prominently in European lore, because it runs in packs rather than killing alone. The author interweaves animal behavior, ecology, and especially predation with personal narrative and history and literature. There is extensive discussion of population ecology and conservation. Many sections are devoted to Quammen's personal quest to see and understand these dangerous animals, but there is extensive reference to scientific as well as cultural literature. Throughout, Quammen reminds us of the serious impact of the burgeoning human overpopulation, and that top level predators are at greatest risk--they require the most space and they consume livestock. The conservation theme is a dominant one. Not a resource, but suitable for all readers. ^BSumming Up: Recommended. All levels. J. Burger Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick
Guardian Review
TV executives in the US are fond of saying that there are only three certainties in life: death, taxes and Shark Week on the Discovery Channel. The extraordinary popularity of wildlife programmes - especially those featuring sharks, big cats and crocodiles - confirms our obsession with what David Quammen calls "the alpha predators": animals that not only kill humans, but eat them too. The relationship between human beings and this diverse group of creatures (linked by dietary preference rather than zoology) is the subject of this book. According to Quammen, we are not quite as superior to these animals as we might think: indeed at times we are just another link in the food chain - and not at the top. Monster of God traces the development of our responses to the danger of "man-eaters" (he would prefer a more politically correct term, but has not yet found a better one). First, we were simply in awe of their power, and then we fought back, ultimately taking our revenge on them through wholesale massacre. Only in the 20th century, when most large predators had become globally endangered, did we finally consider protecting them. But to use a cliche of which wildlife film-makers are rather too fond, it may now be too late. Quammen looks ahead to the year 2150, when the world's population is predicted to peak at 11 billion. By then, he believes, most of the alpha predators will have been eliminated. So while he still can, he has gone to see some of them for himself. He travels to India for Asiatic lions, to northern Australia for saltwater crocodiles, Romania for brown bears, and finally to Siberia for the elusive Siberian tiger. At each location he finds the usual conflict between predators and people, refereed by dedicated conservationists whose task is made even more difficult by local and global politics. For this book is as much about people and politics as it is about natural history. As an example of our power over the animals, Quammen describes an extraordinary episode in the life of the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. The despised leader was brought by helicopter to a forest clearing, into which bears were driven so he could massacre them in cold blood - not hunting but butchery, as one observer noted acerbically. In another episode, Quammen's flair for description encounters a suitably bizarre subject: the blow-by-blow account of the preservation of a gruesome crocodilian trophy for the Darwin chapter of Hell's Angels. From the bottom of a freezer, he lifts out a crocodile head - a sizeable armload, big as a duffel bag. Its left eye protrudes like a cup of raspberry sorbet. The front of the snout, from its last crazed struggle, is abraded down to the bone. A majestic and dangerous beast has died an unpretty death, and now someone hopes that its majesty can be recaptured, represented, owned and possessed (minus the danger) in the form of an artefact derived from this hunk of frozen, putrid meat. These encounters, although fascinating in themselves, do not quite deliver the promise of the book's rather awkward subtitle. Following Quammen's brilliant non-fiction debut, The Song of the Dodo , this book feels a bit like that "difficult second album" - a collection of very readable but disconnected essays in search of a unifying theme. And while he is excellent on biblical and classical examples, such as the story of Job and Leviathan, and Beowulf's encounter with Grendel, he chooses to ignore some more popular references. In a work dealing with the relationship between humans and alpha predators, the impact of the film Jaws on our attitude towards sharks surely rates a mention. For me, the most interesting theme to emerge from the book is how an individual's relationship with these creatures can be defined by his or her socio-economic status. The poorer you are, the more likely it is that a meeting with an alpha predator will end in your death. Here we encounter a paradox: those of us in western society may rarely encounter these animals in the flesh, yet we are probably more familiar with their lives than at any time in human history. Look at the recent success of BBC1's Big Cat Week, in which seven million people regularly tuned in to watch a television programme deliberately conceived, produced and marketed as a wildlife soap opera. Despite - or possibly because of - the danger they pose, we just cannot get enough of these magnificent beasts. To put it bluntly: rich people are entertained by predators; poor people are eaten by them. Stephen Moss is a producer at the BBC Natural History Unit. His book on the social history of birdwatching, A Bird in the Bush , will be published in June by Aurum. To order Monster of God for pounds 22 plus p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 066 7979. Caption: article-predator.1 TV executives in the US are fond of saying that there are only three certainties in life: death, taxes and Shark Week on the Discovery Channel. The extraordinary popularity of wildlife programmes - especially those featuring sharks, big cats and crocodiles - confirms our obsession with what [David Quammen] calls "the alpha predators": animals that not only kill humans, but eat them too. The relationship between human beings and this diverse group of creatures (linked by dietary preference rather than zoology) is the subject of this book. In another episode, Quammen's flair for description encounters a suitably bizarre subject: the blow-by-blow account of the preservation of a gruesome crocodilian trophy for the Darwin chapter of Hell's Angels. From the bottom of a freezer, he lifts out a crocodile head - a sizeable armload, big as a duffel bag. Its left eye protrudes like a cup of raspberry sorbet. The front of the snout, from its last crazed struggle, is abraded down to the bone. A majestic and dangerous beast has died an unpretty death, and now someone hopes that its majesty can be recaptured, represented, owned and possessed (minus the danger) in the form of an artefact derived from this hunk of frozen, putrid meat. - Stephen Moss.
Kirkus Review
A somber elegy for the last of the world's "alpha predators." Big, fierce beasts have haunted the human mind since time's beginning, writes natural historian Quammen (The Boilerplate Rhino, 2000, etc.), and the relationship between predatory mammals and their human prey "has played a crucial role in shaping the way we humans construe our place in the natural world." He's surely on to something: given that the natural tendency of humans is to exterminate any predators that threaten them--indeed, some would argue that exterminating them is "basic to the enterprise of civilization"--then it makes sense that our species should have been so hell-bent for so long on reshaping and taming the environments where nasty critters hang out. In a narrative that is better controlled and less footnote-heavy than The Song of the Dodo (1996), Quammen travels to tropical places, wild and on the verge of being tamed, to observe alpha predators in action. He delivers wonderfully wrought, undeniably scary tales of 13-foot-long Nile crocodiles in whose bellies reside the pulped remains of unfortunate Turkana villagers, people who consider their hunter "the punishing agent of a capricious God who was by turns benevolent and vindictive--like the Lord in the book of Job, only worse"; of Siberian tigers whose kind once stalked the inhabitants of the taiga, but that have since been hunted nearly to extinction, ever more rapidly since the end of the Soviet Union and the arrival of a particularly rapacious form of capitalism; of embattled Indian lions and their more adaptable fellow jungle denizens, leopards, far more adaptable to "degraded habitats, forest edges, and agricultural intrusions into wild landscapes." Scary, yes, but for Quammen the real fright is in a future in which a world of ten billion humans can find no room for such keystone species--a world that he fears is approaching all too close. Another good and provocative work from Quammen, sure to engage past admirers and earn new ones. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Acclaimed natural history writer Quammen (The Song of the Dodo) documents the delicate relationship that has existed between Homo sapiens and those few animal species that have actively sought out and eaten humans. Like other creatures, these animals (e.g., big cats, bears, sharks, Komodo dragons, crocodiles, and giant snakes) have been woven into many of humankind's spiritual, mythological, and cultural systems. Starting with biblical times and proceeding into the future, the provocative text takes us on a journey through history that demonstrates how inextricably we are linked to the creatures whose environment we share. Humans have lost much by driving man-eaters to near-extinction where their only hope is life in zoos. By defeating these top-of-the-food-chain competitors, have we thereby defeated ourselves? Quammen would likely answer, "Yes." Rich with personal stories that clarify humanity's true place in the universe, this book will leave the reader eager for more. Fortunately, an extensive bibliography is included. This has all the makings of a science book of the year. Highly recommended.-Edell Schaefer, Brookfield P.L., WI (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| I. The Food Chain of Power and Glory | p. 1 |
| II. Once There Were Lions | p. 17 |
| III. The Muskrat Conundrum | p. 77 |
| IV. Leviathan with a Hook | p. 125 |
| V. Shadow of the Nine-Toed Bear | p. 209 |
| VI. The Teeth and the Meat | p. 301 |
| VII. Perestroika | p. 331 |
| VIII. Science Fiction Ending | p. 399 |
| Source Notes | p. 439 |
| Bibliography | p. 451 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 481 |
| Index | p. 487 |
