An overwhelming amount of information, Keggie Carew compiles examples of animal behavior that highlight their intelligence and social natures. Human habitat destruction and overhunting/fishing and shown to be the hazard that they are to whole ecosystems. In the vein of Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson, Keggie Carew points out the problems, examples of remediation, and proposes solutions to help change our worldview to include the whole picture and appreciate what ecosystem services all animals provide and how biodiversity benefits all. Written in simple language for the layperson. A good review or introduction for anyone interested in conservation and animal rights.

This is a must read and should be a mandatory book for all people who love and have compassion/empathy for animals. Not just cats and dogs. This book gives you all the emotions and is definitely a call to action for drastic conservation numbers and efforts to dramatically the carbon footprint of people.

Every animal has a place in the animal kingdom food-chain which is its own system of checks and balances. Humans taking habitat away and decreasing safe places to live for most animals is detrimental and catastrophic. If this book does not fill you with some sense of digust and rage, then you are not paying attention.

This book is necessary for every person on the planet to read. I am definitely purchasing a copy of this and recommending everyone I know to read it.

Thanks for the author and her point of views and call to action for drastic action to help with the conservation efforts for every animal.

Thanks to NetGalley, Keggie Carew and Abrams Press for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

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I was really excited about this book, and the first bit was going great. Then it got preachy and a tad misinformation-y, though it was talking about UK zoos, not all zoos, so maybe the stats used were just skewed, but it was then that I realized it was a "humans are bad" focus and I don't need to read a book to tell me that. A thing that annoys me about books like this is, you're already hitting your target demo, yet you still choose to patronize.

I appreciate any book that helps us humans look beyond ourselves and feel more connected to the natural world around us, and I applaud Keggie Carew for this encompassing look at our relationship with animals and ecosystems. I found the tone to be a little too "preachy" for my taste, which I think is a challenge of the environmental movement as a whole (and I work in it!).

Listen up, Humanity. Here's your call to action. Time to make a change. In fact, way past time to make a change. Keggie Carew is delivering her passionate message. It is a voice in the wilderness that rang true in my ears.

Since that first bright morning Genesis talks about - no, it would be much much earlier - the first time there was a humanish creature contemplating exactly what to do with that non-humanish creature - that was the day it all started. The day we imposed our will to dominate, and this book invites you to sit awhile and listen. The author moves fast, so wear your running shoes, and bring a thick-skinned slicker, because she's going to deliver many stripes to your humanness, and your family's penchant for abusing the earth. All well and truly deserved. She's shaking your shoulders and boxing your ears - why???? To get your attention, that's why!!!

The topic of this book is ANIMALS and how we've paid back their many known and unknown generosities. Don't let your defensiveness deprive you of a message you've needed for a very long time. Just settle in. The author does a very neat job of good cop/bad cop all by herself.

From topic to creature to extinction to remedy to love to selfish willfulness to tragedy to resolve to wonder to creature to death to life to creature. to them. to you. to me. to us. for me, by that last page it felt very, very Shakespearean.

I will be thinking about this book for a long time, and in my world of e-books and audiobooks, this is one I want a hard copy to read Bible-like before sleeping - so my resolve to DO something to help the survivors of our eons long massacres can continue for our children, and their kits, cubs, chicks, larva, calves, whelps, hatchlings. . .Beastly presents opportunity for much long thinking. . .and in-for-the-long-haul thoughts. And hopefully, you do it right in the middle of the big beautiful outside that is our Earth.

*A sincere thank you to Keggie Carew, Abrams Press, Tantor Audio, and NetGalley for an ARC to read and listen.* #Beastly #NetGalley

When I was very young, my favorite book was a shiny hardcover collection of animal stories. For years, I read about the wild animals I'd never seen, the familiar ones I now saw differently when I knew more about who they were and how they saw the world. BEASTLY by Keggie Carew has taken over the top spot in my animal story-loving heart with wonderful, poetic stories about our encounters and misadventures, all the way we surprise one another as human and fellow inhabitants of Planet Earth. Truly a remarkable, wise, and deeply considered exploration about how animals make us more human, entrancing me from the first pages with a story of an owl landing on a dog walker's head through stories of the horrors and wonders of "scientific" investigation that boggle the mind as well as cautionary and heartwarming stories about what can happen when we forget ourselves and are simply animals with other animals. A beautiful, stunning, inspiring book -- highly recommended. I received a copy of this book and these opinions are my own, unbiased thoughts.

In this a beautiful, but hard read, Carew explores the relationship between humans and other animals. How we’ve used and abused them through the beginning of humankind, but also how some of us have loved them. In this book, there is love, and pain and suffering. As an animal lover myself, I identified with many of the situations here. I had to skip some graphic details about farming techniques or just plain cruelty. There is some science, but it is always approachable. I loved the many anecdotes and the anthropomorphizing which the author, as most readers of these type of books understand is the kryptonite of “serious” researchers. Some parts, about conservation and political measures that can be taken to save the planet, were a little too dry for me, but the joy she takes in all her interactions with all these creatures is contagious. This is a great book for animal lovers because it does give you hope that our attitudes are changing. Maybe not the planet as a whole, but every day there are more converts to the cause. All in all, an uplifting book.
I chose to read this book and all opinions in this review are my own and completely unbiased. Thank you, #NetGalley/#Abrams Press!

In Beastly: The 40,000-Year Story of Animals and Us, Keggie Carew takes us on an always passionate, sometimes meandering, often fascinating, sometimes disorienting, often depressing, occasionally encouraging tour of humanity lengthy and often abusive relationship with the animals we share this world with. Like many such works, it makes for some difficult reading, but it’s often the things we find difficult that are the most important to face.

The book is divided into ten sections, but the best way to think of it is as a series of mini-essays, some more cohesive and focused than others, some leading more clearly into others, some more digressive than others. I have to admit on a big-picture, structural level, particularly early on I struggled with what seemed the random nature of some of the shifts within or between essays. So much so that I actually wondered more than once if my Kindle version had somehow screwed up the book’s formatting. In the end, I don’t think that was the case, but I’m not going to claim 100 percent confidence in that conclusion. So that was the frustrating part—the macrocosmic level of the book, though as noted it improved as I passed the halfway point.

On a micro-cosmic level, considering the essays by themselves, or the vignettes within the essays themselves, or even on a sentence-level, the book fared much better. As noted, Carew’s passion comes out vibrantly and clearly throughout, sometimes more so in a few of the passages, but that passion never distracted or detracted from the writing and honestly, I feel much better about someone writing emotionally about our destruction of the environment and mass slaughter of animals rather than reading about these things via a dispassionate, removed eye. If you can’t get enraged and moved to tears by what is happening, I’d argue you’re not paying attention to what is happening.

But of course Carew brings much than passion to this work. The book is filled with fascinating (and again, depressing) facts and wonderfully vivid stories about human-animal interactions — sometimes charming and sometimes horrifying. There’s St. Thomas Aquinas, “another disaster for the animal world,” who wrote that “Everything that moves and lives shall be meat to you.” Or René Descartes, who made animals into soulless clockwork automatons, allowing his followers to “nail live dogs to the dissection tables and hear their howls as the screeching of gears.” The push-me-pull-me attitude toward the well-known naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, who contributed so much to the idea of nature/the environment as “a dynamic living organism” world but who also, like most 18th and 19th century naturalists, used a gun as much as a magnifying glass or spotting scope as a “tool,” so that his encounters with animals he wondered at “invariably concluded with a bullet and the collection bag.” There are the horrors of the behavioralists and their conditioning and Skinner boxes. The illusion of “conservation trophy hunting.” And of course the litany of factory/corporate/government despoilation and slaughter, such as industrial farming of hogs or chickens. Even Hermann Göering makes an appearance, looking like “a colossal pantomime Robin Hood.”

Against these are balanced more positive stories. The ecologist/zoologist Simona Kossak, who lives in a hunting lodge in Poland with a raven named Korasex and a board called Zabka. Or Konrad Lorenz, an Australian zoologist who showed how geese and ducks will imprint even on a human in a particular window of time after hatching (you’ve probably seen photos). Or Karl von Frisch, An Austrian who discovered the honeybee waggle dance. There’s Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey.

And of course the animals themselves. Some driven to extinction like the Moa and the Steller’s Sea cow, some on the brink, like the big cats or elephants or rhinos, and, in some of the few uplifting incidents, some that have rebounded back from the edge of disappearing, if nowhere near their numbers from decades ago, like the wolves or cranes. Carew relates all these stories clearly and vividly. It’s impossible not to feel the wonder of the whale that, after a crew cut her free of being entangled in a net, breached 40 times in seeming joy at her return to freedom. Nor does Carew focus merely on the awesome (in the literal sense of the world) creatures like whales or the charismatic ones like dolphins. She is equally forceful when discussing the horrible wreckage we’ve wreaked amongst insects and mollusks. Because after all, as she comes back to time and time and time again, it’s all connected. And by “all”, that includes us as well. We’re not just killing “them”; we’re killing ourselves as well. And that harm extends to the psychological/emotional aspects of ourselves, in what has been described for some years now as “solastalgia”—the “type of homesickness you can feel when you are still a home … a kind of existential melancholy for something lost, a forest, or a favourite path, a nightingale thicket or a badger sett.” It’s what Carew calls “the disease of the Anthropocene.” Somewhat related is “eco-furiosity”, an eco-tear-your-hair-out solastalgia on steroids … the long loud desperate cry of the human heart.”

As depressing as much of the book is (this is not a complaint or a discouragement as any accurate description of our impact can be nothing else), Carew does close with some optimism. As well as a push for recent moves to declare ecocide a crime against humanity, similar to a war crime. What we don’t need, she argues, is more data. We know what we are doing. We know what the impact will be. Now is the time to start stopping what we do. If you aren’t sure why that is, or just how urgent the need is, Beastly will go a long way to making it more clearly understood.

This book was really interesting and informative! Required reading for all lovers of animals and the environment.

This was a tough one for me. I love the subject matter and the topic really is something that speaks to me. However, I really found the straight-up facts and information in this book to be the strong point. The cause of environmental conversation and ecosystem preservation is exceptionally important, but Keggie Carew's writing could be too flowery and trying too hard at times for me to really enjoy it. I had a hard time finishing it.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review. All views are my own.

If you like non-fiction, non-political reads -- Beastly could be your next great pick! Exploring what the world would be like without our relationships to animals or how things could have been different in our simultaneous evolutionary history.

Would be fun as an audiobook too!

"Beastly is a gorgeously written, deeply researched, and intensely felt journey into the splendor and genius of animals and the long, complicated story of our interactions with them as humans."

I really enjoyed this book and felt like I learned a lot I didnt know, and look at animals and the natural world a bit differently, in a good way.

Beastly; The 40,000-Year Story of Animals and Us by Keggie Carew is an incredible look at animals and all the glorious lessons we continue to learn from them. A fun read for any library!

An engaging approach to telling a large story. I feel that while it may not live up to the titled tagline, it does seem to capture what the author described as her statement.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the advanced digital copy.

I may have enjoyed this more if I were not acquainted with the subject matter,. and hadn’t been expecting a more objective and primary source based examination of humanity’s impact on nature and vice versa.

However, even if all of this were all new to me, this book would require significant organization, revisions, editing, and polish. It’s more like the author’s enthusiastic account of how she learned about various things. Often the sources discussed are fictional, and include long rambles describing details of things that happen in films.

The author’s enthusiasm over learning new things about the natural world and humanity’s place in it is infectious, but the book is rambling and poorly organized. It’s a disjointed collection of the writer’s personal musings about natural history discoveries and how human beings responded to anthropological finds, works of art, and how progress in human civilization has impacted the natural world. It’s very fanciful. Because the focus is on the writer’s experience learning (plus a lot of meta-analysis about her process in writing this book, there’s a lot of enthusiasm, and too little data. If you have even passing familiarity with the subject matter, you likely will find nothing new here.

The writer uses a lot of words awkwardly and even incorrectly. Beastly is readable but very flawed. I recommend it to people for whom this topic is mostly new.

What an interesting read. Beastly is full of stories and anecdotes. I've earmarked section to go back to revisit.

Thank you to NetGalley for the advanced digital copy.