Dr. Ron Pine reviews Of Books and Beasts

 Thank you, Ron!

From Dr. Ronald H., Pine, Mammalogist:

This marvelously helpful and informative collection of 400 short reviews of books that will be of interest to and use by those involved in cryptozoology should be on the bookshelf of every one of them.  Actually, amateur and professional naturalists of all sorts will find this a most useful book to own.  That’s because Bille has included reviews of many excellent natural history books that don’t deal at all with cryptozoology or do so only tangentially,  Bille believes that the cryptozoology-inclined should give themselves a good contextual background in natural history in general.  Unfortunately, the subtitle, ‘’A Cryptozoologist’s Library’’ might be a bit off-putting to mainline naturalists who would, in fact, find benefit from owning such a book.  And the cryptozoological reviews might awaken an interest in cryptozoology in them. There really was no way, however, in which Bille could have legitimately omitted the words ‘’cryptozoologist’’ or “cryptozoology” from both the title and subtitle, owing to the book's intent. I have a fair amount of knowledge of the books reviewed, have read many, and Bille’s choices are excellent and I don’t see how they could have been improved upon.  The reviews range in length from a single sentence to a bit in excess of two pages.

Bille generally does a good job at neither advocating for nor arguing against the existence of any particular cryptid and includes books highly critical of cryptozoological claims as well as ones highly partisan in the other direction.  As it happens, I am pretty much a skeptic through and through and Bille’s treatment of the cryptozoological enterprise is more friendly than mine would be.  I maintain, for example, that cryptozoology is a pseudoscience while Bille considers it to be a science.  He states that it is a science because it fits Popper’s ‘’definition'' of science, in that it contains falsifiable propositions.  I would maintain that Popper did not provide a ‘’definition'' of science but merely provided a criterion for which sorts of theories and hypotheses could be regarded as of use in science.  In any event, Popper did not claim that just any system of falsifiable hypotheses necessarily constitutes a science. 

Bille’s list is divided into four sections, one on books dealing, in particular, with cryptozoological issues (constituting a bit more than a third of the pages); one on “other sciences” (present-day and paleontological zoological natural history); one on ‘’crypto-fiction’’(novels and the like and, mercifully, omitting “monster porn,” which is a thing); and one termed a “miscellany.’’  The last does contain reviews dealing with books that don’t fit well into the previous three sections but, curiously, also contains ones that unequivocally would.

There is a general Introduction and each section also has its own Introduction and there is an “Afterwords” consisting of Bille’s ideas concerning which unknown animals are the most likely to turn up and information on his own publications.  The Acknowledgments include the usual, along with a note on how Bille chose which books to review, and another on publishers who produce cryptozoological books.  There is a curious section labeled “Index” which lists, for each of the four sections, the book titles in alphabetical order and with the name(s) of the author or authors also provided, and with each entry numbered in sequence; followed by an alphabetical list of all the authors, without numbers. No page numbers are given.  

Scattered throughout the text are relevant pithy comments by various notables and comments by Bille and called ‘’Matt’s Musings.’'

The factual quality of the book is quite high. One quibble that I have is that in some places Matt seems to be out of sympathy with scientific specimen collecting and overestimates its effects on animal population  numbers but in other places he seems to celebrate the presence of these specimens once they’ve been incorporated into the research collections in a museum.  In his treatment of Ivan T. Sanderson's “Animal Treasure,” Bille mentions Sanderson’s report of a cryptid giant bat, but omits mention of the lizard which Sanderson claimed emitted a sound (literally) as loud as a foghorn.  Although Bille discussed movies based on  some of the novels, he missed the cinema version of ‘’The Relic.’’  Portions of that movie were filmed in the Field Museum in Chicago, when I had an office there. 

    

Ronald H. Pine, Ph. D.
Adjunct Research Associate,
Natural History Museum and Biodiversity Research Center,
University of Kansas;
Research Associate, Museum of 
Texas Tech University

Matt Bille, author, Of Books and Beasts: A Cryptozoologist's Library

www.mattbille.com