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Loading... Monster of God: The Man-Eating Predator in the Jungles of History and the…by David Quammen
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. Amazing. (  ) theraph | Jan 3, 2009 |  This is a wonderfully well-written biopsychogeographical account of four alpha predators and their coevolution with humans. It's ultimately not very hopeful about the survival of these species, but I suppose that just makes it an even more important book. (  ) wanack | Jun 28, 2008 | This book reads like an obituary, providing us one last chance to marvel at the animals that top the food chain before they disappear forever. It is engaging and colorful, but ultimately very sad; Quammen certainly does not seem optimistic that any of the great predators can be saved. It is even questionable that they should be, for how can we compare the intangible value of the existence of predators with the lives of those people that they will occasionally kill? Shouldn’t we be glad that we are no longer prey? Or are we losing something that makes us human when we lose these species? With sections about many predators, including lions, crocodiles, and bears (oh my) Quammen outlines the history of human interaction with these animals and the current sad state of affairs. The book is beautifully written, easy to read, and very personal. I enjoyed it, but was left depressed at the human impact on this planet. Thank goodness Quammen has recorded these stories before they cease to exist. ( ) jlelliott | Aug 31, 2007 | Here is another book I bought because there is a cool tiger on the cover. The subject looked halfway interesting so I said what the hell. I was absolutely blown away by this book and have since bought all of Quammen's books and collections of essays. If you are intrested at all in animals, especially the big predators, you will fall in love with this book. ( ) BeaverMeyer | Jul 29, 2007 | Valashain | Jun 30, 2007 | 
 ''In wildness is the preservation of the world,'' Henry David Thoreau famously said, not knowing the half of it. David Quammen's splendid book ''Monster of God'' constitutes an expansion and gloss on Thoreau's prophetic contention, achieved through an artful, focused account of contemporary efforts to secure preservation, in the wild, of some of the most magnificently fearsome creatures on earth -- the large-bodied carnivores, man-eaters (lions, tigers, Carpathian brown bears, giant crocodiles), a group Quammen designates ''alpha predators.'' The stories he presents contain rich detail and vivid anecdotes of adventure, and they provide skillful capsulizations of the politics, economics, cultural history and ecological dynamics bearing on the fate of each of these cornered populations.  As the science writer and naturalist David Quammen observes in his absorbing new book, ''Monster of God,'' alpha predators -- among whom he counts lions and tigers and bears, as well as crocodiles, leopards and the Komodo dragon -- have ''played a crucial role in shaping the way we humans construe our place in the natural world.'' They remind us of our limitations and our place in the great chain of being; they are symbols of our vulnerability, our susceptibility to random death and disaster, our primal awareness, in Mr. Quammen's words, ''of being meat.''
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His research on the lions of Gir forest in India, on the crocodiles of Northern Australia, on the bears of the Carpathian Mountains in Romania, and on the Siberian tigers of Far East Russia finds animals held in constant tension, encircled by every-expanding human populations. But Quammen doesn't oversimplify the conflicts. Often, in fact, Quammen has so much to say about competing interests that he makes several false starts before finding his true theme. Recalling his reading in the l970s literature on crocodiles in Africa, for example, Quammen abruptly jumps to a failed farming and reintroduction project begun in India before finally settling into the investigation of Northern Australia's Crocodylus Park.
These changes in geography, time, and perspective can be disorienting in a book that is already complicated by its several competing approaches. Adding to the abundance, Quammen explores human population growth projections, images of the Leviathan in the Bible, keystone species theory, the Muskrat hypothesis (the idea that the "wastage parts" of an animal species are the ones most likely to suffer predation), and the 1994 discovery of the Chauvet cave paintings. Yet Quammen, author of The Soing of the Dodo moves with such ease through this wilderness of ideas that even the most difficult material becomes palatable. --Patrick O’Kelley
(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:57:55 -0400)
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