Hunting Monsters Darren Naish 9781784285913 Books
Download As PDF : Hunting Monsters Darren Naish 9781784285913 Books
Hunting Monsters
Hunting Monsters Darren Naish 9781784285913 Books
Full disclosure, I'm a long-time reader of Darren's blog Tetrapod Zoology."What we have here, ladies and gentlemen, is failure to communicate." That's actually one of the major themes that comes through in this book. This isn't yet another regurgitation of famous monster stories. Rather, it's an examination of the evidence that supports these famous stories. It's the uncropped pictures (as of Nessie), the full scope of the arguments over the Patterson Bigfoot footage, and so on. It talks about the political and commercial agendas of various players, something you rarely see covered.
In other words, it's a warts-and-all investigation of the evidence, and that's why it's about hunting monsters, rather than finding them. I do agree with the other reviewer who said that the book gets repetitive, but in a way that's the point. Ultimately, it's the same problem repeatedly, of questionable (often staged) evidence, credulous and/or sloppy investigators, authors who over-generalize and ignore details (particularly on lake and sea monsters) in order to make better stories, and, ultimately, monsters whose descriptions somehow morph over the decades to mirror the latest pop science fads. In other words, it is a failure to communicate, of stories being retold, misinterpreted, respun, and ultimately solidified into cultural tropes that have little to do with the original evidence. And that original evidence often seems to have been a prank, a campfire story, or a get-rich-quick scheme.
This is the type of investigation you don't find in all those books on Nessie or Sasquatch. While the book acknowledges that there's still mysteries out there (like the Orang Pendek), in most cases cryptids seem to be the product of human creators and true believers, rather than nature. And that needs to be communicated.
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Hunting Monsters Darren Naish 9781784285913 Books Reviews
My favourite thing about this book is that it goes beyond simply debunking tall tales or explaining cryptid sightings. It considers whether the explanations given for various cryptids are compatible with what we know about evolution and biology, and it looks at how popular culture shapes our ideas about cryptids.
Should we expect that a large hominid like bigfoot might be living in North America, based on what we know about the primate evolutionary tree? How does popular media influence eyewitness descriptions of strange animals? These are the type of questions discussed in Hunting Monsters.
Hunting Monsters is a readable, entertaining book. It is written from a scientific perspective, but Darren Naish is good at communicating scientific concepts to readers who don’t necessarily have a scientific background, so this is a book anyone can enjoy. I highly recommend it.
Very biased, yet researched (obviously). You can tell the author did his homework, but to knock down EVERY single encounter, piece of evidence, etc. just doesn't sit well with me as an interested yet skeptical reader. I'm sure some of what he discusses must be hoaxed but the sheer numbers of people reporting sightings across the globe for centuries, and all types of people with nothing to gain, is just quite obviously one-sided. I had hoped for a more neutral researched book than this.
Hunting Monsters reviews the evidence for many of the most popular cryptids including Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, and various sea monsters without being either sensationalistic or condescending. He does conclude for most that there is not enough scientific evidence to support strong confidence in their existence, but holds out hope in a few cases where the body of evidence is too small for either support or denial. It's readable to a non-scientist and non-cryptid-hunter both.
If you are a "true believer", this book is not for you (and many of the negative reviews do seem to come from this demographic). However, if you are interested in the science and the history behind many famous cryptids, pick up this book. Darren is a mainstream publishing zoologist with many books and papers to his credit along with field work. He is also an avid fan of cryptozoology with his own book on speculative future evolution. As a friend of both strict science and cryptids, he gives as balanced an account as I think is possible.
In most ways this is an excellent book, and should be read by anyone with an interest in Cryptozoology. It is almost sure to offend many "true believers", because the author shreds much of the pseudo-evidence for the existence of most peoples favorite monsters. The one place where the book fails is, ironically, in the area where he (correctly) criticizes many of the people who deal with Cryptozoology. As a group they tend to be far to quick to accept "eye-witness" accounts, which are notoriously unreliable, and vague, usually easily explained by mundane things such as sounds or crumpled vegetation, as "evidence" of the existence of the creatures they are interested in. This is hardly good science, or even science at all, but is often accepted without anything solid to base it on. The author makes exactly the same mistake, in many cases dismissing cases without providing any solid evidence to back his (I suspect correct) conclusions.
Full disclosure, I'm a long-time reader of Darren's blog Tetrapod Zoology.
"What we have here, ladies and gentlemen, is failure to communicate." That's actually one of the major themes that comes through in this book. This isn't yet another regurgitation of famous monster stories. Rather, it's an examination of the evidence that supports these famous stories. It's the uncropped pictures (as of Nessie), the full scope of the arguments over the Patterson Bigfoot footage, and so on. It talks about the political and commercial agendas of various players, something you rarely see covered.
In other words, it's a warts-and-all investigation of the evidence, and that's why it's about hunting monsters, rather than finding them. I do agree with the other reviewer who said that the book gets repetitive, but in a way that's the point. Ultimately, it's the same problem repeatedly, of questionable (often staged) evidence, credulous and/or sloppy investigators, authors who over-generalize and ignore details (particularly on lake and sea monsters) in order to make better stories, and, ultimately, monsters whose descriptions somehow morph over the decades to mirror the latest pop science fads. In other words, it is a failure to communicate, of stories being retold, misinterpreted, respun, and ultimately solidified into cultural tropes that have little to do with the original evidence. And that original evidence often seems to have been a prank, a campfire story, or a get-rich-quick scheme.
This is the type of investigation you don't find in all those books on Nessie or Sasquatch. While the book acknowledges that there's still mysteries out there (like the Orang Pendek), in most cases cryptids seem to be the product of human creators and true believers, rather than nature. And that needs to be communicated.
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