Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #265740 in Books
• Published on: 2004-09-19
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .98" h x 5.52" w x 8.14" l, 1.15 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 528 pages

Amazon.ca
The human mind, for reasons that were once obvious, has long been haunted by intimations of things that go bump in the night. And nothing, as the eminent natural historian David Quammen writes in Monster of God, goes bump quite like what he calls an "alpha predator." Among the ranks of those alphas are scary things indeed: sharks, tigers, bears, crocodiles, Komodo dragons, pythons, anacondas, big cats. "It's a short, formidable list," Quammen wryly notes, and one that is growing depressingly shorter with the passing years, as the predators find habitats torn out from under them, their prey reduced and even eliminated. Quammen travels the world to study these animals in their element, lords of ever rarer domains on every continent. "If we exterminate the last magnificently scary beasts on planet Earth," he closes by noting, "then no matter where we go for the rest of our history as a species--for the rest of time--we may never encounter any others." The thought of a world without things that go bump is unnerving, and Quammen's book is a timely, literate warning that such a world is fast upon us. --Gregory McNamee

From Publishers Weekly
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.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
*Starred 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
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