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Title: The Human Zoo: A Zoologist's Classic Study of the Urban Animal (Kodansha Globe) by Desmond Morris, Philip Turner ISBN: 1-56836-104-1 Publisher: Kodansha International Pub. Date: April, 1996 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.25 (8 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: How many people go to the zoo everyday?
Comment: why we do what we do, why we feel the way we feel are the topics of many good books today but this excellent book takes the questions at hand and approaches them from a unique perspective. Edmund Morris, a zoologist, uses his years of study with animals in an unnatural environment, the zoo and compares their actions to those of their ancestors, humans who are living in an unnatural environment as well. This book is extremely relative to the times, and gives wonderful insights as to why we live in a world with escalating tensions among countries, races etc.. If the reader allows her/his mind to be as creative as the author who wrote this book the possibilities to make improvements in ones life and in the world at large are endless. (The author sites Jane jacobs and her excellent work The death and life of Great American Cities which I would also highly recommend)
Rating: 5
Summary: "Well, let's bungle in the . . . zoo?"
Comment: Like Desmond Morris's _The Naked Ape_, this book is an old friend of mine. The second volume in his well-known trilogy (the third is _Intimate Behavior_), this one makes a compelling case that modern cities are less like "jungles" and more like zoos.
Other animals, Morris says, don't behave in the wild the way humans do in cities. But the sort of erratic violence and heightened self-stimulation in which we find modern humans engaging _does_ have a counterpart in the rest of the animal world: animals do act that way . . . in zoos.
Essentially, Morris's claim is that many millions of years of evolution have equipped us for life in small communities in which everybody knows everybody else and there's enough room for us to move around without klonking into each other all the time. We are not, in short, adapted to the modern metropolis, and that's why "city folk" are so danged weird. And our misattribution of our maladaptive behavior actually gives the jungle an undeserved bad name.
So what's a naked ape to do? I don't know that the intervening years since this book was first published have generated a whole lot of solutions. I guess that's, um, life in the big city.
But as with so many problems, just being aware of the problem is at least half the solution. As with Morris's other books (especially _The Naked Ape_), it's profoundly helpful to step back and see ourselves as one biological species among others (whether or not that's _all_ we are).
Okay, maybe that's not all we are; maybe the fact that we _can_ thus step back from ourselves is the single most important fact about our species. If so, that makes this book more valuable, not less.
So think of this book (and Morris's others) as a way to give your "I" a little distance on your "me," if you know what I mean. And yes, that does mean that I'm recommending a couple of books on evolutionary anthropology as helpful to your spirituality.
Rating: 5
Summary: A mind-shaking interpretation!
Comment: Beautifully written...an elegant work about relationship between nature and human kind. Strongly recommended...
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Title: The Naked Ape : A Zoologist's Study of the Human Animal by Desmond Morris ISBN: 0385334303 Publisher: Delta Pub. Date: 13 April, 1999 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: Intimate Behavior: A Zoologist's Classic Study of Human Intimacy by Desmond Morris ISBN: 1568361637 Publisher: Kodansha International Pub. Date: August, 1997 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: THE NAKED EYE by D Morris, Desmond Morris ISBN: 0091878675 Publisher: Trafalgar Square Pub. Date: 24 July, 2001 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: Dogwatching : Why dogs bark and other canine mysteries explained by Desmond Morris ISBN: 0517880555 Publisher: Three Rivers Press Pub. Date: 31 March, 1993 List Price(USD): $10.00 |
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Title: Peoplewatching : The Desmond Morris Guide to Body Language by Desmond Morris ISBN: 0099429780 Publisher: Vintage Books Pub. Date: 14 June, 2002 |
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