The author is a medical doctor, sociologist, and professor at the National University of Brazil, and author of many political and scientific books across natural history, psychology, economics and sociology. This is the successor volume to GODS, GRAVES & SCHOLARS, a natural history. The instant volume traces the relationship between men and animals from the dawn of life to the modern laboratory and into the future. Unique scope, with forecasting.
His Themes: Origin, giants, migration, man as superanimal (translation issues). Animals in antiquity and middle ages - cave art, taming and breeding, Juvenal's panem et circenses, the klinai of Lucullus, latifundi, arenas, sacred, fables, pets, superstition, herring, manege, fola, matadors (literally "the butchers" [183]), panchatantra, souls, morals, magnetism, sex of plants, Linnaeus' peloria (flax "monster")[225], vivisection, malthusianism, pulex, pampas settlement, Wallace and Darwin, Serum, Malaria, mus migration, more humans than all the other large animals put together, tissue-breeding, devitalization,
calorific reckoning. Even with new data, the author's perspective is not only engaging but filled with useful implication. ( )