A View to a Death in the Morning. Hunting and Nature Through History

This book is an elegant, erudite, stimulating essay on the history of Western ideas about humans and nature. -- Adam Kuper "Nature" A splendid book..."A View to a Death in the Morning" shows both past and present to be a lot more complicated than the slogans of simplistic ideologues. -- Betty Ann Kevles "Los Angeles Times" In graceful prose, infused with wit, irony, and asides that lend unexpected and sometimes poignant relevance to his discussion, Cartmill tells an evocative story of human ambivalence about hunting and our relationship to the animals we kill and sometimes eat...This book is a marvelous piece of social history on a topic of wide significance. -- Bruce Winterhalder "American Scientist" There is every reason to believe that animal rights will become increasingly central to our political discourse in the next century. As this issue moves toward center stage, "A View to a Death in the Morning" will figure prominently...A razor-sharp analysis that succeeds in raising doubts about deeply rooted and widely shared assumptions concerning the position of human beings in nature. -- Robert Rydell "Science" [A] splendid book..."A View to a Death in the Morning" shows both past and present to be a lot more complicated than the slogans of simplistic ideologues. -- Betty Ann Kevles "Los Angeles Times" A stunning survey of society's attitudes toward hunting from classical literature through, inevitably, the greatest anti-hunting event of all time, the release of Walt Disney's Bambi...What [this book] does, with a breadth of literary scholarship and analysis that is most unusual in academic science, is trace society's ambivalence and polarization about hunting from classical Greece...through Rome...and on to the present day...Cartmill's consistent theme--which ties each era, each society, each viewpoint, together in a satisfying text--is his focus on a society's understanding of the relationship between human beings and nature itself. -- M. R. Montgomery "Boston Globe"