Words Like Locusts Flew From Her Fingers

Killing Leviathan

Powell’s Books – Review-a-Day – Monster of God: The Man-Eating Predator in the Jungles of History and the Mind by David Quammen, reviewed by Times Literary Supplement: “In Monster of God, [David Quammen] takes as his starting point Leviathan, the all-powerful, all-devouring menace, whose role is to teach us to know our place beneath God. For if we fear the monster, how much more should we fear the God who made him. As with Leviathan, so too should we be mindful of the lion and the tiger, the crocodile and the bear -for they too can eat us up for their supper. The knowledge that, potentially, we were prey, has been a check on our pride, and, argues Quammen, a key to our sense of belonging to a larger entity which is all life on earth. So what will happen to us when the monsters have gone? David Quammen suggests that by the year 2150 our human population will have stabilized at 11 billion, and that all alpha predators will be behind bars, fences or plate glass. This book examines that which we are about to lose — not the species so much as the states of mind.”

I was sent this book review just this afternoon. It’s a fitting follow-up to my earlier blog about the Maryland bear hunt. Read this review and then consider this: A great part of me yearns for a return to the old days when people couldn’t send their children out into the woods for fear of them being eaten by wolves or bears. The time of the fairy tales. The time of “Peter and the Wolf” and the time of Saki’s “The Interlopers”.