Volume 50, Number 15 · October 9, 2003
The Lady, or the Tiger?
By Tim Flannery
Monster of God: The Man-Eating Predator in the Jungles of History and the Mind
by David Quammen
Norton, 515 pp., $26.95
'There are always a few tigers roaming about Singapore,' the naturalist and evolutionary theorist Alfred Russel Wallace noted in the 1860s, 'and they kill on an average a Chinaman every day.'[*] Not too long ago only slightly less shocking statistics prevailed over much of Southeast Asia, as indeed they still do in parts of India. Such figures give the impression that big predators and humans have waged an eternal, bitter struggle for survival. Yet as the nature writer and novelist David Quammen reveals in his latest book, Monster of God, the relationship between man-eaters and their potential prey is far more complex, interesting, and deeper than that simple conclusion suggests.
Review, 3306 words
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