Monster of God: The Man-Eating Predator in the Jungles of History and the Mind

Amazon.com
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 O’Kelley


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 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."

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Monster of God is journey through time and landscape, through science and literature and myth, to explore the nature of big predators and the variety of human attitudes toward them. It's an intellectual travelogue spanning continents and disciplines - from Romania to Australia, from ecology to art history, and from Beowulf to Hollywood. In search of human voices as well as formidable beasts, Quammen visited and revisited four remote landscapes, little-known places where rural people still lead perilous lives in propinquity to one or another species of big predator. His book carries us along on those travels - up to high meadows in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania, where the brown bear coexists uneasily with cheese-making shepherds; to an Aboriginal community in northern Australia, where the saltwater crocodile is venerated as an ancestor; to the snowbound Bikin River valley in the mountainous Russian Far East, where the Siberian tiger competes with natives trappers of the Udege tribe for a limited supply of deer and boar; and to the Gir forest of western India, last refuge of the Asiatic lion, where stock-herding people known as Maldharis graze their buffaloes in the presence of the great cats. It also takes us into the background of ecological thinking on certain crucial concepts, such as food chains, the pyramid of numbers, and keystone species.

SYNOPSIS

Natural history and fiction writer Quammen explores the psychological, mythic, and spiritual dimensions of the relationship between one flesh-eating animal and one human victim. He believes that relationship has played a crucial role in shaping the way people construe their place in the natural world. His sojourn ranges from old literature such as Beowulf and Gilgamesh, to the movie Alien Resurrection. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

FROM THE CRITICS

The New York Times

Mr. Quammen, who wrote a science column for Outside magazine for many years, is able to make highly complex biological and ecological dynamics readily accessible to lay readers, while at the same time regaling us with what initially sound like stream of consciousness musings on such disparate matters as the relationship between authoritarian governments and alpha predator populations; the existential terror of being attacked by a crocodile; the dentition of various sorts of carnivores; the contentious relationship between tigers and dogs; and the attitude colonizing powers tend to take toward native wildlife.

But as the book progresses, the reader begins to realize that such musings are less digressions for the sake of digression than illuminating asides that underscore the marvelous complexity of nature, its fragile system of checks and balances, and the domino-like effect that change and flux can have on its intricate machinery. — Michiku Kakutani

The Washington Post

A lesser writer might have turned this book into a shrill polemic, yet another tirade against modernity and extinction (subjects the scholarly Quammen tackled in his previous effort, Song of the Dodo). But he proves to be a fine reporter: insatiably curious, level-headed and amazingly erudite, calling in air support from a vast array of sources, living and dead. (When he learns that Australian outlaw bikers revere the crocodile, for instance, he pays a visit to a taxidermist who specializes in the tricky business of preserving massive croc heads for Hell's Angels' dens.) In the end, for Quammen, it comes down to a question of numbers: With 11 billion humans crowding the planet, there just won't be room for lions or tigers or bears. The crocs may have a fighting chance, since they live mostly in water and not on land. — Bill Gifford

NY Times Sunday Book Review

"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. — Norman Rush

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. (Aug.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

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