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The Book of Deadly Animals
  • Published: 28 November 2011
  • ISBN: 9780141966311
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 256

The Book of Deadly Animals



Wry, gripping and simply unbelievable: the world's most authoritative compendium of animal attacks on human beings

Consider, if you can, the case of Jacob Fowler, who heard what he thought was the sound of his own skull cracking between the jaws of a grizzly bear - only to discover that it was. Or the Arizonan jogger who ran a mile back to her car with a rabid fox clamped to her arm before driving to hospital for live-saving inoculations. Or the woman who was attacked by a hyena, dragged from her tent by her face and survived to tell of her ordeal.
The dangers of the animal kingdom are the stuff of legend but the reality of man's vulnerability and of nature's savage power is far more various, improbable and chilling than even the most active imagination would fear. In this unique work of nature writing, you will encounter the most formidable predators on land and sea - as well as the most overlooked, bizarre and inventive hazards that mother nature has to offer. Meet the cougar that can leap 40 feet and clear 8-foot fences with a fully-grown deer in its jaws, the tapeworm that's been known to grow as long as 82 feet in the human gut and the elephant that single-handedly destroyed an oil tanker.
Drawing on an enormous host of true encounters between man and beast, this is the world's most authoritative compendium of animal attacks on human beings. With mordant wit and expert timing, Gordon Grice provides a gripping journey to the dark side of the animal kingdom and a celebration of its humbling, savage glory.

  • Published: 28 November 2011
  • ISBN: 9780141966311
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 256

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Praise for The Book of Deadly Animals

A must for anyone even remotely thinking of getting a monkey, a sea lion, or, heaven forbid, a dog

David Sedaris

A fresh, strange, and wonderful new voice in American nature writing

Michael Pollan

I think the only way I could possibly have enjoyed this more is if I happened to be an adventurous twelve-year-old boy, but still, even for a fully domesticated forty-year-old woman, it was both a thrill and an education

Elizabeth Gilbert

I wolfed it down

Will Self on The Red Hourglass

First-rate, unsentimental writing about nature and about the ways that human beings try to cope with the most terrible cruelties that nature offers up

The New York Times

Elegant and wryly funny

Esquire