As the subtitle of David Quammen's Monster of God: The Man-Eating Predator in the Jungles of History and the Mind suggests, his fascination centers on those animals that raise human "awareness of being meat," and he likens the historic impact of these predators to modern-day car accidents: sudden, unexpected, life-changing. While his research is extraordinary--encompassing extensive field work and diverse reading on the science and lore surrounding predatory animals--Quammen's peripatetic mind jumps from history to psychology to ecology and from Africa to Russia to Australia, sometimes leaving his readers without a base camp to recuperate during the breath-taking journey. 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 OKelley
From Scientific American
Incoming college freshmen often hear an advisory adage: "You don't take courses, you take professors." That is, regardless of the subject, enroll in classes taught by the best instructors. In that spirit, even without a previous interest in man-eating predators, potential readers will very likely find Monster of God worthwhile because David Quammen wrote it. Quammen is probably best known for the years he spent at Outside magazine, writing beautiful, witty and informative essays, which live on in the collections The Boilerplate Rhino and The Flight of the Iguana. His previous sprawling science-cum-travel book was The Song of the Dodo, a globe-trotting adventure that took the author to wild places in search of secrets of island biogeography. A chunk of that work dealt with the Komodo dragon, a stealthy hunter that occasionally bags itself a human victim. Man-eating predators must have gotten under Quammen's skin--figuratively, fortunately. The new work is entirely devoted to the contemplation of a few of the remaining species that can stalk, attack, kill and eat a human being. "It's one thing to be dead," Quammen writes. "It's another thing to be meat." He frames his parameters in the first chapter. Elephants, bison and rhinos trample the odd person; wolves and hyenas may pack-attack the unlucky human; snake venom poisons people; and "malarial mosquitoes could be considered the deadliest form of wildlife on the planet." But those animals do not sit precariously atop the food chain. Quammen's thesis is that human beings have a special, coevolutionary relationship with top predators, a result of having long been the hunted rather than the hunter. The top predators thus still haunt our dreams, having been incorporated into our mythology, art, epic literature and religion. One could make the same argument, in particular, for snakes--big ones still sometimes consume people, and they are certainly represented in mythology, art, literature and, God knows, religion. But it somehow feels right that Quammen has confined his discussion to four large beasts that can defeat, kill and eat any person not carrying significant weaponry: lions, crocodiles, bears and tigers. Using case studies to illuminate general points, Quammen limits the locales from which he reports. For lions, he visits the Gir forest of westernmost India, where a few hundred individuals, belonging to a subspecies closely related to the more familiar African lion, survive in close quarters with Maldharis, traditional buffalo herders. Next he hangs out with the Yolngu of north-central Australia, who hang out with crocodiles. He then takes us to Romania's Carpathian Mountains, where bears share the woods with shepherds and state forest managers. The bears are conspecific with American grizzlies but as recently as 1988 had a population density 20 times that in Yellowstone National Park and its surroundings. And he finishes in the Russian Far East, where the Udege people hunt and trap small mammals while avoiding being hunted and trapped by Siberian tigers. Like any good reporter, Quammen bugs people. He sucks information from scientific experts as well as from the people who still live more or less alongside these animals. And he acknowledges his pestering, referring to the graciousness of one source for putting up with "my greedy, unfocused curiosity." That self-description is manifest in the finished work. Reading Quammen can be like having a cocktail-party conversation with a man just home from an around-the-world tour but who is, amazingly, not boring. And so, in addition to news from the front, the reader is treated to excursions into taxidermy recipes, mythology based on heroic battles against man-eaters (including an entire synopsis of Beowulf and a good piece of The Epic of Gilgamesh), a review of the scientific analysis of predator teeth structure and function, and discussions of ecological theories of body size and predator-prey relationships as functions of environmental constraints. He also muses on cave art, with specific attention to paintings rediscovered in 1994 at Chauvet Cave in France, which, based on the subject matter of an artist who toiled about 35,000 years ago, was lousy with lions. In all Quammen's case studies, the human voraciousness for habitat means increasingly tragic human-predator interactions and probable eventual doom for the predators. After reviewing U.N. population estimates of almost 11 billion humans teeming on earth by 2150, he writes, "Call me a pessimist, but when I look into that future, I don't see any lions, tigers, or bears." Oh my, indeed. The only way to ensure a version of survival may be to allow individuals of these species to be hunted for big bucks, thus making extant beasts economically attractive. "To me it's a tedious paradox," Quammen concludes, "not a liberating insight, and no matter how often I hear it, applied to one or another magnificent species in their various corners of the world, each time I find it tedious afresh. But, beyond quibbling over details of linkage and enforcement, I can't rationally disagree." Steve Mirsky is an editor at Scientific American and writes the monthly Anti Gravity column. (829)
*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
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
Quammen's ability to turn science into high drama is unmatched.
About the Author
Recipient of an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, David Quammen is the author of five acclaimed natural history titles.
