Synopses & Reviews
Respect for animals has always been a part of human consciousness. Poets, thinkers, philosophers, scientists and statesmen have long celebrated our compassion towards Earth's other beasts.
Awe for the Tiger, Love for the Lamb compiles the most significant statements of sensibility to animals in the history of thought. From the myths of the ancient world to the Middle Ages to Darwin and beyond, Preece captures the most telling and fascinating accounts of humankind's relationship to the wild world, placing them in historical context.
Jung called it "an unconscious identity with animals," while Wordsworth saw it as the "primal sympathy which having been must ever be." Linking the diverse chords of human experience that are touched by the animal world, Preece shows that despite a historical thread of cruelty, there still remains in all humanity a constant underlying concern for other beings as an integral part of the moral community.
With musings and meditations from Lao Tse to Mohammed, from Plato to Jane Goodall, from classical religion to parliamentary proceedings, Awe for the Tiger, Love for the Lamb is an original, superbly researched history that deepens our understanding of all living beings.
Review
"This intelligently edited, deeply researched anthology presents a wealth of writing, from antiquity to the beginning of the twentieth century, on compassion toward animals....[It] can be approached equally as a literary anthology and a historical one, because it contains selections not only from Bentham, Mill, and Darwin, but also from Sheridan, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Christina Rossetti, the Brontës, Dickens, Hardy, Stevenson, John Henry Newman, Ruskin, Lewis Carroll, Shaw, Twain, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky." Benjamin Schwarz, Atlantic Monthly (read the entire Atlantic review)
Synopsis
Includes bibliographical references (p. [361]-399) and index.
About the Author
Rod Preece is Professor of Political Science at Wilfrid Laurier University. He has written widely about animal rights, and is the author of Animals and Nature: Cultural Myths, Cultural Realities and Animal Welfare and Human Values.