This little book is best digested chapter by chapter, so as to ruminate a bit. The author gives historical references to illustrate his points, and you're left with the profound notion that people have a very hard time learning from their own, or others' mistakes. Snyder never mentions anyone by name, but I think we all know who is in question here. The real question is: Have we learned our lesson?
I really looked forward to this book. I'd read one other with the same premise (dead people speaking about their lives from the grave) and it was rife with community secrets and a long-ago mystery that gradually crystallized to clarity. I'd hoped for the same. Um, no. I had several problems with this book.
1. At times it just felt like an outlet for the author's stream of consciousness. Ugh.
2. The dead people curiously all spoke with the same "voice". Wouldn't that have been corrected at a 5th grade level or so?
3. There was really no closure of the circle of all the stories. Just meandering. He's not that good of a writer for that to be satisfying.
Suffice it to say I won't be looking for other books by this author. Or rather, I will, in order to avoid reading them.
Lucy Cooke could write about taking out the trash and I'd read it. And enjoy it. So no big surprised that her torpedo of a book was a rollicking good read and educational to boot. Who knew there were "mean girl" animals? And that some species will morph between male and female depending on the need at the time? And what about female dominated species--particular some who engage in a little girl-on-girl action to break the ice? This book will turn the animal knowledge you thought you had on its head, and then spin you around for good measure. It gave me many spiderweb moments, in traveling from this fact, to that premise, to that speculation that maybe, all along, we've been sold a bill of goods about what's "normal" and what's not. It made me wonder about human evolution, and whether or not we're designed to be nice, or rather, hard-wired to be cruel, and it definitely led me to consider research, and the undeclared biases of the folks in the white coats. A thought-provoking, light-hearted, yet meaty book--I highly recommend it.
