Reviewed by Andrew Rowan - This book by science writer and journalist David Quammen about pandemic threats to humans arising from animal pathogens (zoonotic) was first published in 2012, eight years before the current coronavirus pandemic that appears to come from bats, possibly with a...
Reviewed by Andrew Rowan - There are many celebrations involving animals around the world. Many will be familiar with the story of Peter and the Wolf and the version put to music by Prokofiev (his most frequently performed work) where each animal is represented by...
Dog Is Love: Why and How Your Dog Loves You (2019) by Clive D.L. Wynne. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. How Dogs Love Us: A Neuroscientist and his Adopted Dog Decode the Canine Brain (2013) by Gregory Berns, Amazon Publishing. The Genius of Dogs: How Dogs Are Smarter Than You Think...
Reviewed by Andrew Rowan - In an earlier issue of Tales of WellBeing, we discussed the role of animal characters in children’s literature. Most of the characters are fictional but Moo and Me tells the true story of the friendship that developed and strengthened between a...
The Dog Days of Summer are so-called because Sirius, the dog star, appears in the night sky from around July through September. Sirius’ appearance in the night sky has long been associated with hot, dry weather (which is becoming hotter and drier as the earth...
Notes from Publisher’s copy plus additional comments by Andrew Rowan - The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were rough times to be a stray cat in New York City. The city’s human residents dealt with feline overpopulation by gassing unwanted cats or tossing them in...
Reviewed by: Kathleen Rowan - Nepal is a relatively small country (94 th in total area – about 150,000 sqkm) but it has an extraordinarily diverse fauna and flora (one article claims over one hundred different ecosystems). This is not that hard to imagine when one...
For more than 200 years, children throughout the world have been learning moral lessons from stories heavily populated by both verbal and non-verbal animal characters. Whether we are talking about Peter Rabbit and Jemima Puddleduck from Beatrix Potter, Babar the Elephant from Jean de Brunhoff,...
Reviewed by Andrew Rowan - The human population of Africa is projected to climb from a little more than 1.29 billion in 2018 to over 2.5 billion in 2050. Unlike the rest of the world, where the population has leveled off or is even decreasing, Africa’s...
Reviewed by Bernard E. Rollin, PhD - I must admit to some degree of shock when I encountered Dr. Hall’s Aristotle’s Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life. The idea of a “self-help” book based in Aristotle’s writings struck me as bizarre. But upon reflection, it dawned on...
