The Chicken Book [Paperback]

Page Smith (Author), Charles Daniel (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 27, 2000

Liberating today's chicken from cartoons, fast food, and other demeaning associations, The Chicken Book at once celebrates and explains this noble fowl. As it traces the rise and fall of Gallus domesticus from the jungles of ancient India to the assembly-line hatcheries sprawled across modern America, this original, frequently astounding book passes along a trove of knowledge and lore about everything from the chicken's biology and behavior to its place in legend and mythology. The book includes lively discussions of the chicken's role in literature and history, the cruel attractions of cockfighting, the medicinal uses of eggs and chicken parts, the details of the egg-laying process, the basics of the backyard coop, recipes, and much more. Entertaining and insightful, The Chicken Book will change the way we regard this too often underappreciated animal.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"This book will definitely have a place on my bookshelf. Originally published in 1975, it began as a collaborative college course on the chicken by a scientist, a historian, and their students. Except for the professors, who were backyard chicken keepers, none knew a whole lot about chickens. The result: a big book that pretty much covers the subject from Araucanas to Plymouths to Yokohamas; from the origins to cockfighting, folklore, modern chicken/egg 'factories,' and backyard chicken raising."--Michael Gaspars, Whole Earth

“It's hard to decide whether this book is more fascinating and valuable for its information on chickens or for its insight on the modern homestead movement. But then, just about anyone will find The Chicken Book to be interesting, amusing, and fun to read on several levels. . . . Chicken lovers will be delighted with all of this. But the general reader will also be rewarded. . . . Underpinned by several serious ideas but sprinkled with a generous dose of humor, [it] makes for some fine reading."--Countryside and Small Stock Journal

"A fascinating account of the great impact that the chicken has had upon man. For anyone with any interest in chickens, the book is not only informative but is also fun to read."--Choice

"Smith and Daniel are obviously enthusiastic (though not sentimental) about their subject, and they've provided some good, interesting, and useful reading on the chicken."--Library Journal

"A delightful treatment blending evident research with forthright admiration for the ubiquitous chicken."--Booklist

"At times amusing, essentially very serious, this engaging offbeat look at the chicken—as an estimable creature in itself and as a symbol of man's desensitization through technology—[is] a pro-chicken, pro-man Western omelette worth reading and pondering."--Publishers Weekly

About the Author

Page Smith (1917-1995) was a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Charles Daniel is an emeritus research professor of biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Product Details

• Paperback: 392 pages
• Publisher: University of Georgia Press (April 27, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 082032213X
• ISBN-13: 978-0820322131
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #725,724 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

43 of 44 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Name Says It All, April 7, 2002

By 

elcajonfarms (Lafayette, California United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Chicken Book (Paperback)

From egg to poult to hen to rooster to featherbed and deepfreeze, from the ancient Egyptians to neo-feudal Southeast Asia to the iconographic Petaluma chicken ranch to the modern industialized chicken culture, this book covers everything you could ever need, want or just happen upon with respect to the chicken---except for one thing: it totally ignores the Chicken MacNugget!! Nonetheless (or perhaps because of this), it is not just a manual for the chicken fancier, the cockfight afficionado or the backyard farmer. It is truly an examplary product of a "LIBERAL ARTS EDUCATION", and deserving of much wider appreciation than it has received to date. Page Smith, a well-known popular historian, co-taught an interdisciplinary seminar with a biologist named Charles Daniel entitiled "The Chicken" for undergraduates at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in the early 1970's. No doubt some initially perceived the course title as a joke, but they were wrong. Somewhere along the line, someone injected some intellectual rigor and real insight into the course syllabus. With the aid of their teachers, the students performed a tour de force of research, covering every facet of the chicken from cultural, historical, religious, biological, agricultural and even epistemological points of view. The professors took the student work and fashioned it into a book that is a classic in every sense of the word. "THE CHICKEN BOOK" is a beautifully written minor masterpiece of historic arcana, zoological detail, small-scale poultry management, veterinary medicine, cultural anthropology, blood-sport historiography and culinary arts. Long out of print and hard to find, the book well deserves this new edition. Whether or not you have a specific interest in chickens, this is well worth reading. As an example of what an active intelligence can do with a relatively commonplace and mundane topic, this book was way ahead of its time!!

22 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The History of the Ubiqutous Chicken..., October 29, 2002

By 

OkieAspie "Aspergain Covetor" (Oklahoma City, Oklahoma United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Chicken Book (Paperback)

This is a great book, detailed concise. It is wonderful from a Historical standpoint and for someone wanting simply to know the where and why of chickens. It is not light reading but it is the best fact filled book out there, most chicken books are too "ditzy". This is not the case here.Fact filled and entertaining, could use a few pictures but excellent just the same.

16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Not Happy But Fascinating, January 6, 2006

By 

Karen Davis, PhD (Machipongo, VA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Chicken Book (Paperback)

The Chicken Book
By Page Smith and Charles Daniel
The University of Georgia Press, 2000
Softcover, 380 pages.
ISBN: 0-8203-2213-X

Reviewed by Karen Davis[...]

When I started United Poultry Concerns in 1990, one of our first members, Ruth Dahl of Minneapolis, Minnesota, sent me her well-thumbed copy of The Chicken Book, first published in 1975. Like me, Ruth engaged in an impassioned dialogue with the book, underlining passages and writing in the margins. The Chicken Book invites a passionate response. Anyone who is interested in chickens and in the human relationship with the chicken, worldwide and historically, should buy and read this book.

The Chicken Book is not a happy book, but it is a fascinating one. It presents a jumble of messages including chicken and egg recipes. The two chapters devoted to cockfighting tell you a great deal about this activity, but if you expect Smith and Daniel, who oppose chicken factory farming, to oppose cockfighting, be warned. They show the cruelty of cockfighting, but their main criticism is directed at the "prigs" and "prudes" who historically have opposed cockfighting and sought to outlaw it. Of the British Parliament's decision to ban cockfighting in 1834, they claim, "No one was harmed by cockfighting except the reckless in their pocketbooks."

They write: "Cockfighting was, to be sure, a brutal sport, but this is a rather brutal world and it perhaps is not too much to suggest that the passion to reform it might have been directed at worthier targets" (p. 96).

The authors state, and they show, that "There is an abundance of evidence that Western man's rages and lusts, however sublimated their forms, are fully as cruel as those to be found in other cultures" (p. 124). For some people, including the authors, humanity's cruel rages are defensible if they take a classical populist ceremonial form. But when the human rage for cruelty takes a modern industrial form their hackles rise. Smith and Daniel deserve credit for being among the first informative critics of chicken factory farming. They focus particularly on the battery-cage system of egg production. Compared to old- fashioned chicken-keeping, which was being converted to industrial production in the 1950s, they write: "The rows upon rows of neat, clean birds, with their mutilated beaks, in the small cages, were like a glimpse into an Inferno as terrible in its own way as any of the circles of Dante's hell" (p. 287). Here Ruth Dahl cried out with her ballpoint pen, "And No One Cares and Helps Them!"

The Chicken Book describes the poultry genetics mania that began in the 1930s when the biologist John Kimber started Kimber Farms in Fremont, California. "It was his inspiration to apply the most modern discoveries in the rapidly expanding field of genetics to the breeding of chickens for specific purposes--meat or eggs" (pp. 270-271). Noting that the term "Farms" was a concession to popular sentiment, the book observes that the "efficient, white-gowned workers in the antiseptic laboratories of Kimber Farms had little time for sentiment. To them the baby chickens (half of whom were killed at birth and incinerated or fed to the hogs) hatched by the millions in their enormous incubators had to be seen primarily as items on an assembly line. The fact that they were alive was, it seems fair to suggest, incidental" (p. 272).

The Chicken Book has interesting chapters on the chicken in folklore and in "medicine"; the ancients used the testicles of cocks (the authors tell us the term "rooster" was coined by the prudish Victorians) to "treat" impotence and epilepsy, and "Pliny wrote that when a man suffered from chronic headaches a cock should be shut up and forced to abstain from food and water for several days, then its feathers should be plucked from its neck and bound around the patient's head along with the cock's comb" (p. 127).

The Chicken Book contains some of the best writing about chickens anywhere, including passages from Plutarch and the Italian Renaissance writer Ulisse Aldrovandi. Here, for example, is the authors' description of the birth of a chicken:

"As each chick emerges from its shell in the dark cave of feathers underneath its mother, it lies for a time like any newborn creature, exhausted, naked, and extremely vulnerable. And as the mother may be taken as the epitome of motherhood, so the newborn chick may be taken as an archetypal representative of babies of all species, human and animal alike, just brought into the world" (p. 317).

The Chicken Book is an important part of the chicken's history. Though for some reason the photos of "a modern incubator" and "a modern chicken factory" are missing in the reprint, society's industrial curse on chickens is etched in words:

"Chickens confined, and especially chickens confined in large numbers, like people confined in large numbers, are at their least appealing. In such circumstances, chickens, like people, give off offensive odors; disposing of their cumulative wastes becomes a major problem; they behave badly to each other, bedeviling and pecking each other in boredom and frustration; they become neurotic and susceptible to various diseases of the body and the spirit. This is what happened to chickens." (p. 272)
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