Monster of God

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Monster of God is a 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.