Read about the other entries on the list.Beasts: What Animals Can Teach Us About the Origins of Good and Evil
by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson
If the two most cognitively advanced predators in the animal kingdom are humans and orca whales, why have we murdered over two hundred million of our own species, while these "killer whales" have killed none of theirs? Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson – author of The Dog Who Couldn't Stop Loving and Why Elephants Weep – uses the world's wildest creatures to illustrate how our own behaviors contrast with that of nature's other inhabitants. With compassion and a storyteller's eye for detail, Masson journeys back to civilization's dawn to explain why we characterize our most violent behaviors as animalistic, and why our early habit of classifying "otherness" as an "us vs. them" distinctions in our own species has proven a societal detriment.
--Marshal Zeringue
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