Book review: Monster of God: the man-eating predator in the jungles of the mind
By: David Quammen
Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company, USA, 2003, 515 pp.
ISBN: 0-393-05140-4
Let me save you the trouble of turning 515 pages and sacrificing about half a kilo of paper that was once a tree. Don’t bother buying this book. If you are a reader of a journal like WILDLIFE BIOLOGY there is nothing new for you here.
The idea of the book appears great. The author sets out on a journey visiting sites around the world where large and fierce animals come into conflict with people. The examples chosen are the last Asiatic lions in the Gir Reserve of India, the salt water crocodiles of northern Australia and eastern India, brown bears in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania, and Siberian tigers in the Russian Far East. Along the way the book/author focuses heavily on how these fierce and potentially life-threatening predators are viewed by the local people.
We are also given some background lessons in ecology, predator-prey relationships and evolution. There is no doubt that David Quammen has done his homework, as each destination has clearly been researched in staggering detail, and there are no obvious mistakes or errors in the research. Such a line-up of exotic animals and destinations should make any book that visits them a success, especially when made by a knowledgeable guide. However, the author drags along so much detail that the reader will almost drown in facts and figures and quotations. His habit of interrupting the flow of the story into numerous in-depth asides makes it almost impossible to build up any momentum in the reading. By the time that you come to the end you feel that you got lost in one of the sucking mangrove swamps where the crocodiles live. The promise of the book is that we will get some insights into how people can live with conflict-full wildlife; this promise is never delivered. However, there was one rather sobering thread that reappeared several times, namely that when conflicts with fierce animals occur it is often the poor and disadvantaged that bear the brunt, often paying with their lives, of the international efforts to conserve these 'flagship' species.
John D.C. Linnell
Norwegian Institute for Nature Research
Trondheim, Norway