Brain Advance Access originally published online on October 5, 2008
Brain 2008 131(11):3103-3107; doi:10.1093/brain/awn205
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© The Author (2008). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Guarantors of Brain. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
Book Review |
A foxed mirror
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
Martin Kemp starts this wonderfully written, erudite, beautifully produced and lavishly illustrated book by noting how we have a propensity ‘to react to members of the animal kingdom as if they have personalities that can be read from their appearance’ while, at the same time, ‘we tend to see individual people as bearing some kind of resemblance to our fellow vertebrates, or even invertebrates’. We humanize animals and animalize humans and this two-way traffic is ubiquitous. Fables, from Aesop to La Fontaine and Orwell, bestiaries, proverbs, metaphors, insults, terms of praise, our everyday talk about strangers and familiars, household pets and the creatures of the wild, draw on and reinforce habits of anthropomorphization and animalization. In recent years, the pincer movement on the gap between man and animals has gathered pace: humans have been seen as more animal-like; and animals have been claimed to have capacities that were thought to
Emeritus Professor of Geriatric Medicine
Manchester University