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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Real or imagined, literal or metaphorical, monsters have exerted a dread fascination on the human mind for many centuries. Using philosophical treatises, theological tracts, newspapers, films, and novels, author Stephen T. Asma unpacks traditional monster stories for the clues they offer about the inner logic of our fears and fascinations throughout the ages.
Take a Closer Look at the Mythical Creatures from On Monsters
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Take a Closer Look at the Mythical Creatures from On Monsters
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The manticore monster was thought to favor human flesh. Descriptions of the beast appear in the natural history texts of Ctesias, Aristotle, and Pliny. Pencil drawing by Stephen T. Asma © 2008, based on a sketch from Edward Topsell’s seventeenth-century bestiary. |
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Pen and ink drawing by Stephen T. Asma © 2008. |
A skeleton of a Protoceratops, and especially the psittacosaurus or “parrot-beaked” dinosaur found in the Dzungarian basin, looks exactly as you might imagine a griffin skeleton. Attempts to make sense of dinosaur fossils certainly stimulated monster speculations in the ancient world. Pen and ink drawing by Stephen T. Asma © 2008, based on a sketch by Albrecht Dürer. |
Symbolic of God’s power, the biblical Behemoth appears in the Book of Psalms and Job. Pencil drawing by Stephen T. Asma © 2008. |
From Publishers Weekly
Asma's book zooms in on the subject of monsters, both mythical and real, past, present and future, detailing how they have fascinated and frightened the human imagination through all of recorded time. Conjuring dread, the mind's eye has embraced the Philistine giant Goliath, Grendel, the golem of Jewish lore, Frankenstein's monster, freak shows, monster spectacles and werewolves with equal parts affection and terror, writes Asma, a philosophy professor at Columbia College Chicago. Using varied media sources, from history to legend and literature, Asma studies the symbolic meaning of monsters (e.g., biblical monsters represent arrogance in the face of God's power) and their psychological function. He concludes that humans need an excuse to fight, protect and defend, as well as to transfer those horrific qualities, our own monstrous desires, to inhuman beings. A wide-ranging exploration of fear and evil, Asma's presentation and theories are original and practical, depicting those dark, repulsive notions of an unstable, turbulent world in which everybody must struggle to remain human and civilized. 30 b&w illus. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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94% buy the item featured on this page: On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears $18.45 |
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