Abstract

Christopher Preston’s Tenacious Beasts: Wildlife Recoveries That Change How We Think About Animals is a timely and nuanced assessment of how some key wild animal populations have been faring in these unprecedented recent decades. The book is carefully crafted and engaging and is certain to educate any reader. In particular, any of its major sections would well serve undergraduate or graduate level courses on environmental ethics, or even a section on that topic in a more general philosophy survey. Robert Frodeman offered a vision of philosophers as those who “best serve[ ] society as professional amateurs, helping communities gain a sense of how the parts of our lives fit together. How . . . the truths that science discovers relate to our lived experiences in the world” (Frodeman “A Sense of the Whole,” in Earth Matters 2000, p. 119). Each section of Preston’s book is a stand-alone testament to that vision.