Whats for supper?
A review by Stephen Mills To find yourself on someone else’s dinner plate is profoundly humbling. For David Quammen this edibility is an important psychological condition. In Monster of God he 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
