Monster of God: The Man-Eating Predator in the Jungles of History and the Mind
David Quammen
For no small reason, David Quammen asks us "to contemplate... the predator-prey showdown between one dangerous, flesh-eating animal and one human victim." That relationship, he believes, "has played a crucial role in shaping the way we humans construe our place in the natural world." There is a ferocious lot to contemplate in Quammen’s Monster of God: The Man-Eating Predator in the Jungles of History and the Mind (Norton, $25.95), an exhaustive global quest to the besieged lairs of magnificent predators supremely equipped for making meat of man: the Asiatic lion of India, Romania’s brown bear, Australia’s saltwater crocodile, the Siberian tiger of Russia. In the end, and at every turn, we come face to face with the most monstrous predator of all, and disquietingly realize it is us.
— William Stolzenburg
